Secondhand Heroes
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: HPDM slash. The world Harry helped save is darkening and changing around him, and he doesn't think he can save it a second time. Maybe hiding a fugitive Draco Malfoy is a start, however.
1. Chapter 1

**Title: **Secondhand Heroes

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.

**Rating: **R/M

**Warnings: **DH spoilers (ignores epilogue), violence, torture, angst, profanity, paranoia, past character deaths.

**Pairings: **Harry/Draco

**Summary: **The world Harry helped save is darkening and changing around him, and he doesn't think he can save it a second time. Maybe hiding a fugitive Draco Malfoy is a start, however.

**Author's Notes: **This is a medium-length chaptered fic, with eight parts, and thus will end up being about 32,000 words. It's dystopia!fic, and for reasons that will be revealed later, some of the characters might seem rather OOC at first. The violence and torture warnings are **serious;** please don't read this fic if you have a weak stomach.

**Secondhand Heroes**

Harry saved Draco Malfoy because he was tired.

He was so tired that he couldn't Apparate when he came out of the Ministry, and so he stood with his eyes shut for some moments in the middle of Muggle London, swaying with the pulse of cars traveling on a distant street. He thought about collapsing in the middle of the alley and staying there until morning. Or, no, he wouldn't be allowed to remain until morning, would he? Someone would find him and take care of him. He'd wake to soft sheets—some poor bastard turned out of bed for him—and hushed whispers of awe and whatever he wanted to eat.

It made him so _tired. _He could have lived with hero-worship if the "worship" part of it hadn't become so literal.

He forced his eyes to open and his legs to move. Already he'd attracted a small crowd of wizards on their way to the Ministry for late-evening business or their way home, like him; he'd become good at sensing such things. They'd stare in adoring silence until one of them managed to come up and ask if he could be allowed to do something for Harry. And Harry couldn't stand that. The way he felt right now, he would cast a curse that would stick the questioner's tongue to the roof of his mouth forever.

And he wouldn't be sent to Azkaban for it.

_That, _Harry thought, as he managed to shamble out of the alley that housed the Ministry's entrance and into a second alley, _sums up what's wrong with the wizarding world today._

The stones beneath his feet were dirty, the sky above him gray and dripping a mild, warm rain that Harry tilted his head back to drink. He would be soaked by the time he got home. He didn't care. No one shared his flat with him.

He'd thought, once, that people who had known him from childhood and remembered his bumps and bruises and poor scores in Potions class might be immune to the disease of loving him that had swept the wizarding world after his defeat of Voldemort at the Battle of Hogwarts. He'd been wrong, and bitterly, and loudly, and since then, he'd thought it best if he stayed alone.

Ron asked Harry to move in with him and Hermione every week, of course. He'd asked again this morning, in between giving Harry the names of the latest Dark wizards to be sent to Azkaban. Harry had pretended an intense interest in his paperwork, and Ron had clapped him on the shoulder and told him in a commiserating fashion that he understood; Harry wanted to get back to what was _important_, documenting the fates of victims. What was one Dark wizard or Death Eater more or less?

Harry had begun to scribble furiously as Ron left, and Ron had assumed he was working on a report and tiptoed out. In reality, Harry was composing the tirade on parchment that he couldn't yell into his best friend's face.

Scattered scraps of the tirade returned to him now as he walked down the alleys, passing the occasional Muggle and, far more often, the disguised wizarding placards that would reveal their true messages about peace and safety and law and order and turning in suspected Dark wizards only to those with a touch of magic in their blood.

_What in the world is wrong with everyone? The Death Eaters took over the Ministry during the war, so you want to root them out of the Ministry; all right. But is throwing people in prison on the testimony of one person, without a trial, the way to go about it? Why are we developing spells that track Apparition and spells that destroy an individual's wand from a distance if it's thought to be used in a curse? If they're so necessary, why didn't they exist until the last year?_

_Why are we going back to literal witch-hunts? Why can the Aurors use the Unforgivables again? Why is everyone spying on each other?_

But he kept the questions to himself, because when he tried to voice them, even Ron and Hermione only looked at him in wonder. Kingsley patted his shoulder and told him not to worry about it. Harry had saved the world from Voldemort, and had been recruited immediately into the Aurors, without even having to take his NEWTS. He'd done enough for the present. He could hunt down Dark wizards and bring them in, but why didn't he let other people handle the justice?

Harry was the only person he knew who thought it was too much, both the reverence paid to him for something he'd needed the help of two dead men to accomplish and the punitive measures taken against the Death Eaters. That meant something was wrong with _him_, didn't it? If only one person in the entire wizarding world—only one person on the right side, anyway—thought things had gone too far, then he must have a biased perspective. Everyone else agreed with each other.

Well, not the Order of the Dragon, if they were real. But Harry thought the rumors of a group of rebels dedicated to disrupting the harsh punishments and freeing the wizarding world from the tyranny of the Ministry were only propaganda, put about to keep people "alert." He wished them luck if they did exist, of course.

But it couldn't be his fight. He was tired, and uncertain he was morally right—all his certainties had been casualties of the war—and too effectively a hero. The people who called him Savior would do anything for him, except let him do anything.

He walked past the mouth of an alley that probably connected with Knockturn, it was so small and dark and contained such a strong smell of musk and potions ingredients. God alone knew what the Muggles thought went on in there. Of course, Muggles were probably smarter than to walk past the alley mouth at eight in the evening. Harry grimaced and sped up a little.

"_Help._"

The cry stopped Harry, not because it was loud, but because the pain in it was inhuman. He spun around, one hand resting on his wand, eyes aching because he'd opened them so wide with startlement. Perhaps he'd happened on one of the real crimes, rather than the suspected ones.

"_Lumos_," he whispered, and stepped closer.

Then a voice he recognized chuckled, and said, "You'd have to do better than that to convince someone to help you, after what _you've _done, Malfoy."

Harry froze. No, it wasn't a real crime, it was another half-crime. The person who had spoken was the Auror Emmet Gingerbrats, who had lost a cousin to Bellatrix Lestrange. His eyes had shone the day that Draco Malfoy was declared a fugitive for violating house arrest and casting a curse with his interdicted wand. No doubt he'd dreamed of getting Malfoy alone and making him pay, since Narcissa was in Azkaban already, the Lestrange brothers had died resisting arrest, and Lucius Malfoy had died of "extreme questioning."

Harry had spoken of the part that Draco, via his wand, and Narcissa, via her lie to the Dark Lord, had played in helping him win the war. Everyone had patted him on the head and ignored him as usual. The wizarding world, they said, needed to see justice done, and Harry had given in because, well, did _he _know what justice was?

Gingerbrats must have cornered Malfoy at last. That weariness roared up in Harry again like a white flame. Even if he interfered, it would do no good. Did he want to try?

He leaned around the corner.

He was just in time to see Draco Malfoy, lying on the dirty ground of the alley, arch off the ground, his limbs splayed to the sides and twitching, his mouth open in pain so extreme that he couldn't cry out.

And Harry was too tired to ignore that.

He stepped forwards. Gingerbrats turned to face him, mouth open in surprise and then in shock. He fell to one knee and bowed his head.

Malfoy slumped, his head turning to the side in a limp, lolling manner that made Harry sick to look at. A small trickle of drool crept out of the corner of his mouth, cutting around his lips like a line of blood.

Harry trembled with fury, but managed to restrain himself. He wouldn't impress Gingerbrats by flying into a rage, and he needed the man to obey him so that he could actually win Malfoy free of this situation.

"What are you doing?" He had never heard his own voice sound so icy, except in his dreams, where he told all the people who loved him blindly off and it actually worked. He was mildly impressed that he could translate that tone from imagination into reality.

Gingerbrats looked up, his forehead wrinkled. Contrary to his name, he had curly dark hair, and his eyes were a brilliant blue. Looking at those eyes, Harry could imagine Ron in the same position, genuinely unaware of what he had done wrong, and his heart wrenched and tried to spew out of his mouth. But he maintained his intense, still, waiting posture anyway, and his leveled wand.

"Sir?" All the Aurors called him that, though Harry was the least of them in seniority, along with Ron, and in a sane world wouldn't have finished his trainee years yet. "Only what we're allowed to do. I've claimed Malfoy as my kill."

Harry closed his eyes. He had heard, but not actually received confirmation of, the existence of "claim pools" where certain Aurors demanded the right to kill fugitives if they ran across them.

"Of course, if you want him, then you should have him." Gingerbrats scrambled to his feet, and his voice was eager. "You'll let me watch as you kill him, won't you, sir? And perhaps you'll use Cruciatus. I don't think I can manage it yet, but I heard all about how you managed it during the war, against one of the Carrows."

_What have we come to, when that story is repeated, and _not _used as a cautionary tale? _Harry opened his eyes and gave Gingerbrats a scornful glance. "Do you think I would rely on the Unforgivables when I can use more powerful and subtler magic?" he asked. He could make his voice like a whip tipped with scorn, too, he noted with interest. Perhaps he should have tried this tone on Ron and Hermione. Gingerbrats winced. "How do you think I defeated Voldemort?"

The other Auror flinched a second time from the name, but his eyes were wide and his breathing short. Like almost everyone else, he didn't believe that Harry had gained mastery of the Elder Wand and killed Voldemort that way. Tales of Harry's "unknown" powers had made the round of the Ministry three times before he stepped through the front door for his first day as an Auror.

"Can I watch, then, sir?" he asked timidly.

"I don't choose to share the secret of that magic with someone who claimed a kill I wanted for myself." Harry turned his back on Gingerbrats and made a show of contemplating Malfoy. No matter how good he might be at lying with his voice, he feared his expression would give him away if he went on looking at Gingerbrats.

"I never heard anything about your claim," said Gingerbrats, but he sounded humble, not challenging. "I'm sorry! I never would have put a mark on him if I'd known."

"It's all right," said Harry with feigned indifference. He bent over Malfoy and cast a Lightening Charm to transport him, then slung him over one shoulder. He hoped fervently that the position wouldn't cause him more damage, but he didn't dare treat Malfoy gently in front of Gingerbrats. "Doesn't look like there are many marks." He winked slowly at Gingerbrats. "Time to go change that."

Gingerbrats brightened. "I'll cover for you," he promised. "You might not like some of your fans knowing about this; they think their Savior should be more than human." He lowered his voice conspiratorially. "Only someone scarred by the war can know how much you just need to show anger sometimes."

_Showing anger, he calls it. A pain spell like that. _Harry took a single deep breath as though blowing away the temptation to do violence to Malfoy before he reached his flat, and gave Gingerbrats a tiny smile. "That spell you held him under seemed like an interesting punishment," he said. No one called the magic the Aurors practiced "curses," no matter how Dark it became. "Maybe I'll use that one to start with. What's its name?"

Gingerbrats blushed like Harry had when he tried to ask Cho out to the Yule Ball. That was a terrible thing to see on a grown man, Harry thought. "Oh, that? The White-Hot Spell. It's nothing much, just makes him feel like his veins are on fire."

"But it's not physical?"

Gingerbrats grinned. "No, it affects his mind, but not anything else." He grimaced at Malfoy, who lay with his head hanging limply past Harry's arm. "Of course, he probably _feels _like it affected more than that."

Harry nodded thoughtfully. "That _is_ interesting. I know some spells like that myself."

"Sir?" Gingerbrats took a step closer, as if he imagined that the words he was about to hear would admit him to Harry's inner circle of confidants.

Harry smiled and aimed his wand casually at Gingerbrats's face. The man still didn't look alarmed. He kept on staring at Harry expectantly, a small smile tugging at the corners of his lips.

"As an example," Harry said, "_Obliviate._"

Gingerbrats blinked once more, and then his face went slack as if he had only just awakened from sleep. Harry shivered once—the expression, or lack of expression, reminded him too much of the way Malfoy had looked under the White-Hot Spell—and then rushed into the lies he wanted Gingerbrats to hold as his memories.

"You've been out walking, seeking Malfoy, this evening," Harry said. "You thought you had him, but it turned out to be a wizard with hair like his. You'll go back to the office and brood on your failure for a few hours, and then go home. And, of course, it would be too embarrassing to mention this to anyone else."

Gingerbrats sighed, as though complaining about his woe already to an invisible audience, and then turned and wandered out of the alley. Harry closed his eyes and used his wand to check for Apparition-tracking spells in the area before he vanished. There was one, which was probably the way that Gingerbrats had caught Malfoy. Harry disabled it with the counterspell Kingsley had confessed to him one night during a private party, and which he hadn't thought he would ever need.

He hadn't been going to interfere in this new darkness. It wasn't the kind he could fight.

But it seemed that one weariness had finally outweighed the other.

* * *

Malfoy was a mess.

Harry had expected that, but it was one thing to look at the trickle of blood coming out of his nostrils and another to read the long list of damage that was appearing in red ink on a scroll of parchment. Harry had used the same spell that Madam Pomfrey had sometimes used in the Hogwarts infirmary to check for hidden injuries after a Quidditch fall. He had vaguely thought it would be useful if his partner was hit by an unknown curse.

That had been back when he envisioned the former Death Eaters as the real enemies of peace and freedom in the wizarding world.

Now he finished reading to the bottom of the list and swallowed, looking back at Malfoy. It was a miracle his mind hadn't closed in on itself and driven him mad simply as protection. There had been the White-Hot Spell, and before that a curse which made his bones so fragile that they started to crumble under the weight of his skin and muscle, and a spell designed to make him relive his worst terrors in his dreams every night, and a spell to exaggerate his emotions so he would go into hysterics with each scrape or good deed done to him…

Gingerbrats hadn't done all this, not unless Malfoy had spent much more time under his wand than his call for help had indicated. Harry had to wonder if Malfoy had been captured some time ago, by the Aurors or other "interested parties," as the roving bands of vigilantes tended to call themselves, and worked over before he escaped. And then, of course, he'd run straight into Gingerbrats.

"You do have the worst luck," Harry told him, stroking the air above Malfoy's head where it lay on his pillow; he didn't want to touch the skin of Malfoy's scalp yet. Then he began to cast the necessary healing spells. He didn't know very many, but he was stubborn, and his magic was strong, though without the mysterious edge so many people thought had killed Voldemort. Healing spell cast on top of healing spell would work, eventually.

And it was worth something, to watch Malfoy's skin gradually thicken and toughen, to see his eyes lose their glazed sheen—he'd been halfway to blindness, with some of the curses performed on him—and to see him twitch and then relax into a deeper and more restful sleep as the magic moved through him. Harry enjoyed the feeling that he was _fixing _something. Sometimes he had wondered whether the world wouldn't be better off under Voldemort than the twisted thing it had become since he defeated the Dark Lord.

Of course, when he finished healing Malfoy the larger problems would still remain. Harry didn't have the speaking talents that he really should have had, and that so many people attributed to him when the fawning _Daily Prophet _took some commonplace remark of his and surrounded it with complimentary adjectives. He couldn't persuade anyone that their actions were wrong. He didn't know how to whisper in the Minister's ear and turn him to a different course, either, even though the Minister was a personal friend.

But small things he might still be good at, in the same way anyone was good at them. Small things he could do. He would hide Malfoy until he recovered and send him on his way, perhaps procuring a passport that would take him to France or further. In other countries, the hero-worship of Harry and the hatred for Voldemort's followers was nowhere near as intense. Malfoy might have to live a guarded life for the rest of his days, but somewhere he would come close to normality.

When the last healing spell Harry felt capable of using had been cast and he sat panting in the chair beside the bed, he wondered if he ought to fetch Malfoy some food. His ribs had pressed against his skin because of the weight spell and not because of starvation, but still, he couldn't have eaten well, if at all, under the "care" of his captors.

He would get him some food. In a moment.

* * *

When he awoke, his neck hurt, his watch said he should have been in the office an hour ago, and Malfoy was watching him.

Harry sat upright, moving slowly so as not to startle Malfoy, and rubbed his neck with a grimace. The healing spells he knew unfortunately did little for strained muscles and bruises; he didn't know why. The wizards who had invented them thought those things too minor to bother with, maybe. Or maybe it really was better for them to heal naturally.

"Why did you save me?"

Malfoy's voice was so hoarse it made Harry wince to listen to it, but it was useless trying to pretend that he didn't understand. He met Malfoy's eyes. They were the hostile eyes of a hunted wild thing. But not a wild thing in a trap, Harry thought. Not yet. Maybe Malfoy really would survive his ordeal with only mental scars.

"Because I was tired of watching people be kicked around and knowing that I turned away from it instead of did something to stop it." Harry rose to his feet and stretched his neck again, which made his back flex in a way that fired a twinge of pain down his spine. He sighed. He was no good at healing _himself_ with natural methods, that was certain. "I'll hide you for a few days, get you physically well again, and then send you to France. Well. France first. You'll go further than that to be safe, of course—"

"I'll never be safe again," Malfoy interrupted.

Harry blinked. Clearly he'd been too optimistic. His treatment must have given Malfoy the edge of paranoia.

"Never in Britain, no," Harry admitted. "But not everyone will care about your supposed crimes during the war, especially in countries that never cared about the war between us and Voldemort. You must find a home that—"

"I'll never be safe because of what I know," Malfoy said, and closed his eyes. "They want to kill me for what I know."

Harry frowned. "Did you overhear—"

Malfoy's steady breathing was the only reply. He had fallen asleep again.

Harry eyed him, frowning. He had the feeling that rescuing Malfoy was going to be considerably more complicated than he'd thought. What if Malfoy was so paranoid that he refused to leave the house? What if did have a scrap of dangerous knowledge that he gave Harry, and that put Harry in the sights of his enemies as well? Though there might be no one in the British wizarding world who would dare to kill its Savior, they could make his life unpleasant subtly, or alter his mind. There were too many Dark curses Harry didn't know, too many he might not recognize.

Well, saving the world from Voldemort had been more complicated than he'd thought it would be, too. But he managed it in the end. And he still owed Malfoy a life-debt from the time when Malfoy hadn't reported Harry to the Death Eaters in Malfoy Manor during the war, and if not for his interference with the Elder Wand, killing Voldemort would have been much more difficult. Like it or not, Malfoy deserved better than to spend the rest of his life running in fear.

Harry went off to firecall the Minister and tell him he wouldn't be in today. Kingsley would ask why. Harry only needed to wink, and Kingsley would accept that Harry was finally taking advantage of the hero's perks they'd all urged on him more than once.

Weariness and disgust turned Harry's legs to water for a moment, so that he had to brace himself with one hand against a door. It was _wrong _that they lived in a world where Harry could take time off from work simply because he'd been lucky and part of a prophecy.

_Wrong._

But the wave ran away again, and Harry sighed and walked into the kitchen. What could he do about it? Nothing. Small things.

He would do his small thing, and hope that would be enough of a light against the darkness.


	2. Stubornness

Thank you for all the reviews!

_Chapter Two—Stubbornness _

"Thank you, Potter."

Harry stepped back from the bed; Malfoy had attacked the food on the tray with a fury that sent bits of egg and crumbs of toast flying off to the sides. He made no comment about how it wasn't good enough for him. He even drank the tea without complaint, though Harry was sure he was used to better.

And that worried Harry. How beaten down must Malfoy be, that he wasn't complaining and making vague threats to tell his father on everyone?

Then Harry winced, remembering Lucius Malfoy was dead. His son would be extremely unlikely to use his name as a threat anymore. Harry sat down heavily on the chair next to the bed, watched Malfoy eat, and tried to think of the future instead of the past.

"I'll need you to stay silent and hidden here whilst I get you documentation," he said. "I think it's best to go through Muggle channels, at least to get you out of Britain. Most of the Ministry still doesn't have a clue how things like that work, and they'd need someone with expertise in forging Muggle documents to notice something wrong with yours, anyway. We'll need to dye your hair; when the warning went out that you were a declared fugitive now, the first identifying marker they mentioned was your hair. I know a few Permanent Glamours that should hold for months. We also need—"

"No, Potter." Malfoy glanced up briefly from the tray Harry had given him. He was still so weak that he needed to lean against the pillows to hold himself back from collapsing into the bed, but the lines of his face were as hard and stubborn as ever. "We don't need to do that."

Harry clenched his teeth, but a sigh escaped anyway. "_Yes_, Malfoy, we do," he said. "There isn't a wizarding way out of Britain that isn't watched, unless you've perfected inter-continental Apparition." Malfoy smirked at him, but said nothing, and Harry concluded he had no smart answer for that. "They've started cursing down unauthorized broomsticks now, and any creation of a Portkey brings at least three Aurors swooping in, even if the makers registered the Portkey already. I don't know how long you've been—unaware—of the general situation, but we can't get you out of Britain except on a Muggle aeroplane."

Malfoy sniffed and pushed the tray away from him. Harry caught it with a Levitation Charm before it could shatter on the floor. Apparently, he thought, irritation laying a familiar sour film over the back of his throat, Malfoy had done with being polite. "There are always ways," Malfoy said, not deigning to notice Harry's anger. "You'd be surprised how many of them have gone out of common memory and aren't watched, because the Aurors and the Ministry officials don't remember them. But that doesn't matter, because I'm not leaving Britain."

Harry stared at him, feeling as if he had Apparated straight into the middle of a brick wall. Malfoy folded his arms and gave a firm nod. He had his teeth clenched together now, Harry saw, or at least that was where he _thought _the faint grinding noise was coming from. Then he realized it was his own teeth. He made himself stop.

"You're mad," Harry said precisely. "They're searching for you. Even my house can only shelter you for so long. They might not punish me, but they'll take _you_ away, and if you think Azkaban's a jolly good time—"

"I know it's not." Malfoy's smile had vanished. "My father wrote to me during my sixth year, and my mother got out one owl before they silenced her." He leaned forwards, the lines of his shoulders hunched and tense. "The interesting thing about this conversation, Potter, is you. You're an unknown factor. Why did you want to help me?"

"I was tired of seeing people be mistreated."

"But you haven't done anything before now." Malfoy laughed, an odd, strained sound that reminded Harry of fingernails scratching down a chalkboard. "Unless there have been a lot of daring rescues I don't know about, and that's not likely. You sat on your arse when I was declared a fugitive, and when they arrested my mother, and when they arrested my father—"

"I know!" Harry found that he'd raised his fingers to his ears, as if he could shut out the story of his own inaction by blocking the sound of Draco's voice. He dropped his hands again and released a heavy breath. "I know, and I'm sorry for it. It was inexcusable. I'll get you away from Britain, and I hope that goes some way towards making up for—"

"It won't." Malfoy's eyes were fever-bright. "When I'm free, will you go back to sitting on your arse again? Will you ignore the next wounded former Death Eater?" He shoved at his left sleeve impatiently, and pushed it up to reveal the Dark Mark on his forearm like a sore. "Do you believe that everyone branded with this thing isn't human?"

"No—I—"

"For evil to triumph, all that is needed is for good men to do nothing," Malfoy said roughly. "I heard that somewhere. Somewhere in the last mad year, when I was running and hiding among Muggles and former friends and sometimes even with ordinary people who knew something was wrong with the Ministry's actions but didn't have the courage to challenge the Ministry themselves. They had the courage to help, though. So did I. I was trying to find some way, against all the chances, to get my mother free of Azkaban prison. And what were you doing? Basking in praise, _enjoying _it, rotting your teeth with chewing on the sugar of adulation—"

"I hate that!" Harry screamed before he could stop himself. "I hate what they do to me and _for_ me! I'd stop it if I could! But every time I try, they only smile at me and make me go away. And I don't have the power to force them to stop, to tell them they're wrong and _make _them believe it—"

He realized suddenly that he was on his feet, wand pointed at Malfoy, as if he intended to continue the torture that Gingerbrats had begun. He closed his eyes and swallowed, suddenly sick. His hand opened, and the wand dropped to the floor and rolled away.

Malfoy spoke above his harsh panting. "You say that," he whispered, "but I haven't been sharing your head for the past few years. I thought you were perfectly content with your lot. You _acted _like it. If you want me to believe you, then come into the fight with me. Help me struggle against the Ministry, instead of run away."

Harry swallowed. "I've just told you," he whispered. Whispering made things sound more solemn somehow, as if he and Malfoy were actually planning a rebellion. But of course they weren't. Malfoy was still paranoid and scarred from the torture he'd undergone; Harry was helpless against the might of everyone who believed in rough justice. "My fame won't help you. It's a prison instead of a power."

"I'm not talking about your fame, you idiot." Malfoy's voice was sharp. "I got further with only ordinary people to help me than I'd ever get if I was walking around at your side and demanding that people bow to the Almighty Savior." Harry glared. The _Daily Prophet _tended to call him that in earnest, which was probably why Malfoy had used the name. Malfoy ignored him, smoothing his thumb thoughtfully over his lip. "Come to think of that, it might convince a few people," he muttered, and then his eyes focused on Harry. "But not the vast majority of them. It's like you said. This has gone beyond one wizard's power to stop now, even if he's a hero. What I need is your wand and your hand, your will and your courage."

"You talk like someone who always planned to fight," said Harry. "And you mentioned something about knowledge you had that might be dangerous…"

Malfoy lowered his head for a moment, and the lines of his face became tighter and more ferret-like than ever. Harry paused, wondering what memories his words had roused. Of course, if Malfoy had spent the entire six months since he was outlawed trying to find a way to free his mother, running, and hiding, he might have picked up the knowledge anywhere.

When Malfoy finally spoke, it was in a whisper.

"I don't know how long they held me. It was pure chance they got me in the first place. I went to meet a contact who didn't show up. It was on a seashore I never saw before; I received the Apparition coordinates by private owl. I think the whole thing was a trap, now, and it took me as cleanly as those Muggle traps take a rat."

Harry, who had seen Dudley playing with a rat in a trap one day, winced but said nothing.

"They took me to one of the ancient manor houses," Malfoy said, his voice soft and almost dreamy. "I do know that. No one builds with stone like that anymore, as if they meant to live in the house permanently instead of moving away at the first sign of trouble. And I think I could recognize it again. There were snakes carved into the wall, several with plumes on top of their heads, one with yellow jewels in its stone eyes—"

"Basilisks!" Harry blurted, and then felt bad for doing so when Malfoy turned to stare at him. But it was impossible not to respond to so clear a description of the monster he'd fought in his second year.

"Yes, that was it," said Malfoy. "I thought I should know them at the time, but I was too busy trying not to lose my mind."

It was the flat way he said the words that was worst of all, Harry thought, rubbing briskly at his arms. Gooseflesh prickled up and down beneath his fingers. He said the words in the way he'd eaten the food earlier, without a trace of the complaint that once would have been automatic. His enemies had taken and broken some part of Draco Malfoy, and Harry didn't know if he'd ever win it back again.

"What did they do to you?" he whispered, whilst being certain that he didn't really want to know.

Malfoy looked at him with strangely gentle eyes. "What didn't they do to me? Chained me upside-down so all the blood rushed to my head. Flogged me with whips that felt like the brush of leaves at first, but carried some potion that got into my wounds and lit them on fire." A twisted smile crossed his face, and he tugged down the ragged robe he'd worn ever since Harry found him; Harry hadn't wanted to try and put him into better clothes when he didn't know if Malfoy's wounds might have made him panic when other people touched him. "And this."

Harry stared for long moments before he realized he was looking at the ruin of scarred and puckered flesh where someone had torn Malfoy's left nipple away. He looked at the floor and practiced strenuous breathing whilst the room spun around him.

"That's why I don't know how long it lasted," Malfoy continued. "Pain wrecks your perceptions enough at the best of times, but this was so many different kinds of pain, continually changing, so I couldn't get used to them. And they were careful never to speak of dates around me, or any time more specific than 'long' or 'short.'"

His teeth suddenly showed. "But they spoke of other things, sometimes, and one of them got careless. I learned something they didn't want me to know."

"What?" Harry whispered. It was the only word he could have forced past his tight throat in that moment.

"That's the knowledge they'll destroy me for, and which I'll use to destroy them instead." Malfoy's eyes flashed with a purity that made Harry glance away in shame. "That's why I can't flee Britain. I need to take vengeance on them."

"Your mother?"

"She's dead," Malfoy said. His voice cracked and rasped with the sound of fear and horror and grief pounded into anger. "And you won't distract me from the goal again, Potter. Are you going to stand with me or not? If you're not, then nothing in the world could persuade me to tell you what I know. I'll kill myself first."

With an enormous effort, Harry managed to move his eyes back to Malfoy's face. Ferret-like, maybe, but noble at the moment, with a strength behind it that Harry thought he himself had lost long ago.

No one had ever expected Malfoy to be a hero, except maybe in the cause of fighting for pure blood and exterminating Muggleborns. And yet he had taken up that role anyway. He had suffered more for his cause than Harry had suffered during the war.

Harry could no more let him go on suffering alone than he could have looked away from one of his best friends dying in the middle of the street. Shame, it seemed, could still cut through his weariness.

"I'm going to stand with you," he whispered.

Malfoy reached out a hand. Harry, trying to ignore the strong sense of déjà vu swirling around him, reached out and clasped it, squeezing. He was ready to draw back if the squeeze became too much for Malfoy's fragile bones and skin, but he was the one who winced when Malfoy's fingernails cut into his skin from the force of his own clasp back.

* * *

Harry nodded to the woman passing him in the corridor, an Auror with blonde hair and green eyes whose name he'd never been certain of, because she started giggling hysterically whenever he tried to talk to her. She did it now, her eyes on the floor and her hands clasping the front of her robes as if they would fall open at any moment. Her eyes darted up to him and then away again. Her giggling grew louder, shriller. Harry tried to maintain a polite expression on his face.

Malfoy had told him to find someone like this, someone who would give him information willingly but wouldn't dare to ask what use he'd make of it later.

Harry stopped, braced an arm on the wall, and leaned towards her. The woman stared up at him with an opening mouth and gradually pinkening cheeks. Harry smiled with an effort. He wanted to sick up, but then, he'd wanted to sick up for several months now and he'd resisted the urge. Surely he could do it now, when it actually mattered that he retain his composure.

"Is it Alissa?" he asked, hoping he was striking near the right name.

"Heloise," the woman whispered, and uttered one more nervous chuckle, and then was still again, staring at him.

"Forgive me." Harry looked away from her as if shy, biting ferociously at the inside of his cheek. He hadn't flirted with anyone since he'd broken up with Ginny. Their responses were too much like this. And yet, Harry knew he wouldn't have dated anyone who simply held contempt for him, either, as Ron had jokingly suggested when Harry turned down the seventh infatuated witch. He wanted something more complicated, something he couldn't even name.

_And you need to focus on the task at hand, not on your nonexistent love life._

"I wanted to ask you a question," Harry whispered. "There's no one else in the Auror Department who would tell me this without making a fuss—"

Despite this silly and patently untrue statement, Heloise's hand immediately fell on his sleeve and clutched fast. "It's all right, Harry," she breathed in ecstasy. "You can trust me."

"Good." Harry glanced up and down the corridor, making sure no one else was near. Of course, Heloise thought he was doing that mainly to make sure he had privacy to flirt with her, and sighed in delight, leaning nearer to him. Harry clenched his teeth and breathed through his nose for long moments until he could bear to go on.

"I really, really need to find Draco Malfoy," he said. "I've learned that he was behind one of the crimes the Ministry thought it had traced to another Death Eater." He paused dramatically for a moment, the way Malfoy had told him to do, though Harry had objected when he heard the plan that no one would fall for this. Malfoy had arched an eyebrow, and Harry had to think about the behavior of the people around him and nod after a moment. "No. I won't try to shift the blame to someone else. He was behind one of the crimes that _I_ thought I had traced to another Death Eater. A crime important to me, that hurt someone I cared about."

Heloise's bright face had grown troubled, and she watched him with what could be dangerous intelligence in her green eyes. He hadn't judged her fairly, Harry realized. Of course, that was hard when she fell over herself around him. "You aren't thinking of going out in the field and hunting him yourself, surely?" she whispered. "It's too dangerous."

Harry had told Malfoy he was no actor when Malfoy described this part of the plan. Malfoy had curled his lip and said, "You only need to tell them what they want to hear. You're _good _at that."

Harry had looked away.

Now he took both of Heloise's hands and gazed steadily into her face. "There are some things a man needs to do for himself," he said. "If I hadn't learned the truth, I could have ignored it. But I know that truth, now, and I can't. Please, Heloise. Give me a chance to be a hero in the old fashion. Tell me what the latest reports say about Draco's Malfoy's whereabouts." Heloise was a field Auror. She would have access to the information that was carefully kept away from Harry, behind his desk or interviewing victims in the company of other Aurors, so as not to "worry him."

Heloise sighed gustily. Now she was the one to check up and down the corridor. But she rose to her toes and whispered into his ear, her breath making the skin along his neck shiver. Of course it would, Harry thought. He couldn't always reconcile his body's lusts and his heart's longings.

"The latest reports put him on the coast of Wales. There were rumors that he might try to escape Britain in a small boat, so we were watching for that, but then he vanished again. He hasn't resurfaced yet."

Harry felt a soul-deep wave of relief shudder through him. He had learned the news he and Malfoy had hoped to hear, that the Ministry didn't have any concrete information about what had happened to him after he vanished into the paws of his unknown captors.

_Time to achieve the thing we_ want_ them_ _to know._

"Thank you, Heloise," he said, and let his voice drop to a conspiratorial whisper. "I've always had a _connection _to Malfoy, you know? A way of knowing what he was up to. I can't tell you how many plots of his I stopped during school. I think I can foil him again, now that I have some idea of where to look." He took her hand and kissed the back of it, trying to give the impression that he was doing something greatly daring. "Thank you."

Heloise flushed all over and gave him a glance that made him wonder if perhaps this one woman's emotion for him ran deeper than hero-worship. But he wouldn't have wanted to pursue her even if it did. Ginny could have offered him genuine love along with the worship. It still hadn't been enough.

"If you don't hear of me for a few days," Harry whispered into her ear in return, "don't worry. I'm out stopping Malfoy from escaping and hurting anyone else innocent."

Heloise nodded, cheeks bright. Of course she wouldn't keep the secret to herself forever, but in the meantime Harry had bought a few days of grace. And when she told the "truth" to Ron, Hermione, Kingsley, and the others who would ask, they would look for him on the coast of Wales, not in his flat.

_Or the other places that Malfoy intends to introduce you to._

Harry gave her a strong, mysterious nod and walked towards his office. Ron clapped him on the shoulder and said something about Harry's success with the witches that Harry didn't hear, because his head had begun to whirl.

_I'm a rebel now. A traitor. Part of the Order of the Dragon, if such people actually existed._

_Does that make me as bad as the Death Eaters?_

* * *

Harry still hadn't resolved his moral dilemma when he went home that evening. But he came in too quietly to alert Malfoy, and thus he surprised him standing half-naked in front of the mirror in Harry's bedroom and staring at himself.

His back was a _ruin_, Harry saw, frozen with his hand on the doorframe. The missing nipple couldn't compare to the deep scars that ran like ravines from Malfoy's neck to his waist. Someone had made a spirited attempt to remove his spine. Writhing, twisting gouges danced around each other on his shoulder blades, leaving not a mark of unspotted skin.

"Come in." Malfoy's voice was that same flat one he had used earlier when speaking of his torture. "Or leave. Don't for heaven's sake _stare._"

Harry swallowed and stepped into the room, still unable to take his eyes away from Malfoy's back. He was shuddering at the sight of all those scars like a horse touched with the whip. But he wasn't thinking about how ugly they were.

He was thinking about how Malfoy had _earned _those marks, every single one of them, doing something heroic in the name of a cause worth fighting for.

And Harry knew suddenly that that was what he most missed about the old days of the war with Voldemort, and in Hogwarts: the power to act. The wizarding world had never treated him sanely; he could have put up with the hero-worship if he could have been a field Auror, or if they'd listened to him when he tried to speak up against using the Unforgivables on Death Eaters. His powerlessness had taken him by surprise, stunned him, and kept him from developing the mental resolution to do something even if he'd had the physical opportunities.

"You shame me," he whispered, and came into the room.

Malfoy's reflection in the mirror curled his lip. "Yes," he said, "I'm used to the sensation. My father said the same thing to me several times before he died."

"Not like that," Harry said. "I wish I carried those marks."

"You're just crazy enough to believe that—" Malfoy began, his voice torn between laughter and disgust.

And then he fell silent, because Harry had reached out and touched the center of one of the tangled knots of scars.

Harry held Malfoy's eyes in the mirror. Malfoy wasn't breathing now. He seemed to be waiting for Harry to pull away and shake his hand as if shaking off contamination.

But Harry didn't move, and in the end Malfoy began to breathe again.

"What caused this?" Harry breathed.

"Acid," Malfoy said. "The whip I told you about."

"These?" Harry slid his hand across the lumpy and bizarrely changed skin to touch one of the deep, parallel scars.

"Flesh-eating creatures of some kind." Malfoy's back rose and fell beneath his fingers with a particularly deep breath. "The skin will never grow back. It still hurts to try and carry anything on my shoulders, just there."

"And did someone really try to take out your spine?"

"Good guess, Potter. Yes." Malfoy spun, so smoothly that Harry never tried to retract his hand, and it ended up on Malfoy's chest instead as they faced each other. Malfoy's nostrils were flared, his eyes quick and bright with some nameless emotion. He seized Harry's fingers and pressed them to a section of his torso between his right nipple and the place where his left one used to be. "Recognize these?"

Harry looked down. Yes, he did recognize the scars left by the _Sectumsempra_ curse.

"I did that," he said. "And I can't change them."

Malfoy released another deep breath, and Harry realized that Malfoy had _needed _him to say that, for some reason.

"Good," Malfoy said. "The last thing I need you to do is enter this struggle thinking it's some chance to pay back your debts to me. It's not. This is bigger than both of us."

_Yes, _Harry thought, as his fingers traced the white scars, _but it includes both of us, too._

It was absurd, how much both that thought and the frantic beat of Malfoy's heart beneath his fingertips comforted him.


	3. Anger

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Three—Anger_

"I do know what's making everyone act this way, Potter."

Harry, his attention on the sandwich he was making, jumped, but didn't give Malfoy the satisfaction of turning around. He simply nodded and tucked a slice of bread on top of the cheese. "Yes. Fear and paranoia and the desire to pay the Death Eaters back for what they suffered, or think they suffered, during the war." He slammed the bread down with a flourish and turned, finally. Malfoy was leaning against the doorway of the kitchen, his eyes still holding the feverish intensity Harry had seen in them when he'd touched his scars. But he had on a shirt now.

Harry was glad. Already he was starting to feel embarrassed about what he'd said to Malfoy in his bedroom, and the way he'd touched the scars without even asking _permission_. Malfoy had probably had enough of people putting their hands all over his body without giving him the chance to defend himself.

And he was losing the high intensity of that moment, even though Malfoy seemed to have retained it. His days of being a hero were past. He had felt strong and powerful with his hand on Malfoy's heart, as if he could change the whole course of the Ministry, but Malfoy only wanted vengeance on his captors, who were probably Death Eaters anyway. That was all Harry had promised to help him with.

"More than that." Malfoy came further into the room, on silent feet. He looked infinitely alien in Harry's kitchen, throwing the patched tile and half-painted cupboards into sharp relief. "You never wondered why everyone suddenly seemed to fall in love with terror after the war? You never wondered why _everyone _you know joined in, with not one person protesting or holding back, if only for the notoriety of it?"

"I didn't wonder that," Harry said. He became aware that he was holding the plate in such a way that the sandwich would probably slide off it and splatter on the floor in a minute, and so he slid it back onto the counter, using that as an excuse to break Malfoy's hypnotic gaze. "I wondered if something was wrong with _me_, for noticing and trying to protest in the first place."

Malfoy halted behind him, and then his hands came to rest on Harry's shoulders. Harry held himself rigid. Malfoy's fingers were hooked, as if he would rip flesh from Harry's back to match the scars on his own. His breath in Harry's ear was as hot as air shut up inside a tomb.

"I know why," Malfoy whispered. "That's the knowledge my captors didn't want me to have, the thing they were laughing over. Every now and then, a Dark magical artifact with the power to sway the minds of many people at once gets loose. It encourages a common delusion, feeds on and fosters it until it spreads from mind to mind like a plague. The only people who escape are the ones persecuted by the infected—always a minority. This artifact was behind the centaur persecutions in the fourteenth century, and some of the witch-hunts, and even one or two of the worse Muggle revolutions. The moment my captors mentioned it by name, I was stunned that I hadn't recognized its effects myself."

Harry forced himself to straighten and move out from under Malfoy's touch, down the counter to where he'd put a glass of butterbeer. He sipped from it, staring determinedly at the window in the opposite wall. That showed him a blurred reflection of Malfoy. He lowered his eyes and coughed. "Your theory has one problem," he said. "I'm not part of the persecuted minority, and I didn't have my mind infected by someone else."

"This particular artifact," said Malfoy, his tone so low he might have been speaking to a lover, "takes a charisma focus."

Harry raised an eyebrow and stared at the reflection in the window again. "Congratulations," he said. "I have no idea what the bloody fuck that means."

Malfoy took two strides towards him and whipped him around. Harry found himself far too close to that presence that thrilled him and shamed him and dragged him out of the blinding darkness and towards the blinding light. He would have loved to close one hand into a fist, but that would result in him breaking the glass or punching Malfoy, one of the two.

"You should have studied better," Malfoy whispered. _He doesn't have to bloody _whisper _all the time, _Harry thought, uneasy emotions racing through him and colliding and falling back like waves clashing around a rock. "A charisma focus means that the artifact latches on to one particular person and convinces the people under its spell that they're doing everything they do in his name. A leader—a priest—a hero. The focus himself isn't affected by the spell, but since it's usually his principles the victims are touting, he often goes along with it to some extent." His gaze speared Harry.

Harry couldn't even growl under his breath, the way he would have liked to, because Malfoy was partially right. "Who cast the spell? If it was the Death Eaters, that was stupid of them—"

"No," Malfoy said. "No one had to cast it. The artifact is sentient, Potter. Once someone digs it up, it begins to exert its influence on that person, and from there it can spread as I told you."

"What is it called, then?" Harry managed to wrench his eyes away at last and wiped his mouth free of a film of butterbeer with the back of his hand. He was disgusted to see that his fingers were shaking.

"The Troublestone. It's a huge sapphire, with the propensity to teleport itself. When its hold is broken, either because its focus dies or because someone outside the range of its influence notices what's happening and tries to destroy it, it takes itself somewhere else, into a hidden vault or crypt. Then it waits for someone to find it, and to begin the cycle again." Malfoy's eyes flashed. "I won't be content with sending it somewhere else. I want to smash it."

Harry eyed him. "And you overheard how to do that, as well?"

"Don't be ridiculous. They would have destroyed it themselves if they knew how." Draco's lips drew back to show his teeth. "They were Death Eaters, yes, as you might have reckoned by now from my mention of the pure-blood manor and what they did to me. Your side hasn't gone quite that far. Not yet."

"Then how will you smash it?" Harry asked, determined not to be side-tracked for the moment, though he did wonder exactly what Malfoy's quest was. Smash the Troublestone, take revenge on the people who had tortured him, break the power of the Ministry so he didn't have to live in fear anymore—that was all a bit much for one man who could barely walk and one broken-down hero to do by themselves.

"How will _we_ smash it?" Malfoy leaned forwards, staring deeply into his eyes, and that was unnerving.

"I asked you the question first," Harry countered, staring back.

Malfoy gave a sharp bark of laughter and stepped away from the counter, letting Harry have room to move and breathe again. "Good," he said. "Simply making sure you'll keep your promises." One of his hands wandered out and closed on Harry's arm, squeezing, until Harry winced. Malfoy didn't seem to notice. "Now. I need to get a look at the Troublestone, if at all possible."

"There's wards on the Ministry to track anyone with interdicted blood who appears there," Harry said quietly.

"Interdicted _blood_?" Malfoy swung back in close again, and wasn't torture supposed to give people a fear of that? "I thought your side was always saying there was no different between pure blood and Muggle blood. Such a spell ought to be impossible."

"It's tied to specific bloodlines," Harry said. "Genetic codes." He looked at Malfoy and found his blank expression satisfying. At least there was one arena of life in which the smarmy git's experience was not equal to Harry's and Hermione's. "It would identify you because you were a Malfoy, not because you were a pure-blood," he explained. "There's no way you can go into the Ministry."

"How kind of them," Malfoy muttered, but didn't explain what he meant, or give Harry a chance to demand an explanation. "I know I can't go into the Ministry. You're to go yourself. You'll bring back Pensieve memories for me to look at."

"I don't have a Pensieve."

"You're telling me the Chosen One can't acquire whatever he wants, whenever he asks for it?"

Harry flushed. People had offered him all sorts of things in the last year, from powerful magical artifacts (including the Sword of Gryffindor) to their children and their naked bodies. But he hadn't felt right _asking _for anything, not when he saw that he couldn't get everyone's bizarre behavior to stop. His conscience said it wasn't right to demand personal favors when he couldn't demand the one thing that would be best for the wizarding world.

"Yes, all right, I'll ask for a Pensieve," he said.

"Not so easy to be a hero when someone's clamoring at your heels ordering you to do it, is it?" For a moment, Malfoy's eyes were far away, and Harry wondered if he was seeing their sixth year at Hogwarts or something that had happened since, something Harry hadn't a clue about.

He took a deep breath to blow away the sudden curiosity clogging his throat, and said, "I still don't know where the Troublestone would be likely to be."

Malfoy tilted his head, eyes shut as he bit so fiercely at his bottom lip that he drew blood. Harry raised a hand instinctively to catch his jaw and try to stop the motion, and then dropped it again, flushing. Bloody hell, he had _strange _reactions around Malfoy. He couldn't remember swinging so wildly from one mood to another since he broke up with Ginny, for one thing.

"Based on its history," Malfoy muttered, "it will seek a center of power, a room or place that symbolizes ownership. It prefers to influence legal authorities, so it would be more likely to appear in, say, a council chamber than the house of a Dark Lord. And it would have to be somewhere out of the common way, or it would have to deal with people not under the spell seeing it." He opened his eyes. "It also prefers to choose a place which matters to its charisma focus, but I don't know if that applies in this case, or you'd think it would have chosen somewhere in Hogwarts."

Harry caught his breath as if a punch had driven it out of him. He'd been eliminating possibilities in his mind as Malfoy spoke, and that last sentence had cut the choices down to one.

"I know where the Troublestone is," he said.

Malfoy didn't question him, but once again caught and squeezed his arm until the tendon pressed to bone and Harry winced. He didn't apologize, either.

* * *

Harry put his chin up and strode down the corridor, trying to look as if he had business in this part of the Ministry. He realized a moment later that he needn't have worried. Everyone looked at him as if he _did _have business in this part of the Ministry, and faded quietly out of the way. Some of them even called soft good-luck wishes after him.

_God, they don't know what I'm doing, it could have been anything, _Harry thought in disgust, and then shook his head. That was the whole point of the Troublestone's charisma focus, as Malfoy had pointed out to him a few hours ago. The leader whose "wishes" the stone's victims fulfilled had to go unquestioned, or it was possible that some people would resist the spell or manage to awaken from it once infected.

Harry took a deep breath and laid a hand on the door of the Wizengamot courtroom where he had been tried five years ago for underage magic. He paused, but he could only feel the general glow of magic that seemed to infest the Ministry lately, from Apparition-detecting spells to countercurses against obscure Dark Arts no Death Eater had ever tried to employ. He opened the door and stepped inside.

The difference of magic when the door was open was immense, and he could only guess it had something to do with the spells already wound into the Ministry's walls, or perhaps an innate protective measure from the stone itself. Waves of rushing power poured across him, making every hair on his body rise and his legs tremble as if they couldn't hold him any longer. Harry pushed his back against the door and fought to take, and keep taking, long breaths. He wasn't about to let a stone defeat him.

Even if it was a dark blue sapphire the size of Voldemort seated on a throne, with gleaming facets that looked as sharp as obsidian.

When he thought he could keep his feet instead of groveling before the stone, Harry took a single step forwards. The stone vibrated and quivered. Harry froze before he realized that only the dance of light along its facets had changed; if it was aware of his intrusion, he didn't see any sign of it. Malfoy had said it was sentient, yes, but that didn't mean it was intelligent on the same level as humans.

_Well. There it is._

Harry stared at the sapphire, and once again a wave of weariness washed over him. What was this going to prove? Malfoy could show the Pensieve images to any number of people, and if they were under the thrall of the Troublestone, they wouldn't react. Or, well, they wouldn't react _at best. _At worst, the sapphire would marshal them to defend itself, and Malfoy would be tortured again. And if it was former Death Eaters who had inflicted all those scars on him, Harry didn't think the other side united enough to make an effective stand against the Troublestone.

But Malfoy had told him to get a good look at the Troublestone, and so Harry wandered in circles around the Wizengamot courtroom, obediently peering into corners so that he would be able to put a detailed plan of the room into the Pensieve. The sapphire rested near the chair in which he'd once sat to face Umbridge and Fudge and all the other people who hated him for telling the truth about Voledemort, and probably for being alive.

Harry shivered with the force of his anger for a moment, and then sighed. What did it matter? Fudge was dead, killed by Fenrir Greyback after the war in futile revenge—that had been what started the intense persecution of werewolves—and Umbridge sent to Azkaban long ago.

What did _anything _matter?

The sapphire sparkled and trembled before him, shining with its own internal light. So keen were the vibrations that it could have risen from the ground, and Harry wouldn't have been surprised.

He wasn't going to be able to achieve what he wanted. He should go back and turn Malfoy in, really. He couldn't make a difference in the world in the way he thought was morally right, so why take on the extra bother of protecting a fugitive who had done plenty of horrible things in his time? Who had almost killed both Katie Bell and Harry's best friend in their sixth year at Hogwarts, and had made things harder than they had to be in the Room of Requirement during the war?

Harry froze. He couldn't remember when he had shut his eyes, but he stood now without trying to open them, listening to his own breathing, calm and cool.

_What's happening to me? _

He had given in to despair in the past, but never despair that would hurt someone else. When he had thought Ron or Hermione showed signs of coming out of the trance of revenge that consumed them and the rest of the wizarding world, he had stood by them, protected them from people who disparaged their ideas, and tried to encourage them.

The encouragements had always failed.

But he had not abandoned them. Not for any reason would he abandon someone who needed him, since there seemed to so few people in the wizarding world who actually did. These thoughts about abandoning Draco were foreign ones, being pressed into his mind like fingers into a snowbank.

Harry backed up, his breathing coming faster now, his eyes open and fixed on the stone. The light flickered over its surface like darting fairies at Christmas, and then calmed. Now the Troublestone was quiescent as it had ever been.

Nevertheless, Harry was sure it had tried to clutch at his mind. Why, he didn't know, because Draco had told him that the charisma focus was the one person not affected by the spell. But it had happened anyway. And he could feel the sensation better now, sharper and colder than he had realized, slicing his own thoughts to pieces. It felt like Legilimency.

A new, deeper rage bloomed in him. After he had finally managed to push Voldemort out of his head for good by dying and losing the bit of soul that made him a Horcrux, he had sworn he would never allow anyone to invade his mind again. That vow had gone by the way in the last few months, as had everything else, mostly because no one _had _tried to invade his mind. But now—

Now it was _personal_, and now he no longer wanted to get rid of the Troublestone merely to help Malfoy or free his friends.

He glared at the stone, stepped out of the courtroom, and walked back to the Auror Office. Some of the people who saw him pass were the same ones who must have heard by now that he'd planned to take a few days off, but even they never questioned him. Gazes full of wide-eyed respect and adoration followed him, and one witch actually fainted when she caught the edge of his scowl.

But now Harry knew they didn't have a choice about feeling those emotions. The Troublestone had chosen to make them feel them, because that was its way of fucking up the wizarding world in general and Harry's life in particular.

Harry snarled and walked faster.

* * *

Harry had asked Kingsley for a Pensieve, and of course he'd been granted one. He'd put the memories in it for Malfoy. Malfoy bent his head over the silvery liquid without a word when Harry gave the Pensieve to him and submerged himself in it. So Harry went into another room to pace and fume and try to work out his anger.

He wasn't succeeding.

God, couldn't he get any peace? Couldn't the people who had fought so hard during the war get any peace? Harry imagined Ron and Hermione waking up in a month, or a week, or however long it would take him and Malfoy to make the Troublestone move on—despite Malfoy's optimism, Harry didn't think they'd manage to destroy it—and looking with clear eyes at what they'd done. They'd _despise _themselves. Hermione in particular; she had encouraged the registration of werewolves and the "management" of house-elves who'd served some of the accused. That should have been his first clue that something was deeply wrong.

Harry paced faster and faster through his drawing room, then whipped around and hurled a curse at an ivory music box on a delicate carved table, both of them accepted in the days when the expression of disappointment on the face of one of his admirers still cut him too deeply to let him refuse gifts. The music box blasted into shards. The table, cut neatly into three pieces, tumbled to the floor and lay there smoking. Harry snapped, "Stop," at the small blaze that was spreading onto the carpet, and it did. He barely realized he'd used wandless magic to prevent the fire from spreading.

He was _furious._

He'd forgotten how it felt to have an emotion this strong and clean roaring through him. Or maybe not clean, because it was carrying the accumulated muck of the last year, the pain and horror he'd felt when he first began to realize what was happening. But it filled him with energy again, and he no longer fought to control the trembling of his muscles and the jumping of his magic—or only enough to ensure that he didn't destroy his flat—but rejoiced in the fact that he had power enough to punish his enemies.

If he could. He hoped that Malfoy really did know a way to destroy the Troublestone. If he didn't, then Harry would have to find out what pure-blood family was likely to have basilisks carved into the walls of its dungeons. He had to take revenge on _someone_, and Malfoy's scars ignited his rage as much as the memory of his mind being tampered with.

"Potter."

Harry swung around, every muscle tense, ready to lash out on general principles. But it was Malfoy standing in the entrance of his bedroom, regarding him with a steady, unflickering gaze, and something like approval.

"I've studied the defenses on the stone," said Malfoy. "I'm sure we can get to it. And then we can destroy it." A manic smile lit his face. Harry thought he might have found it disturbing four hours ago. Now he felt a thrill of heat stab down from his throat to his groin.

"Good," Harry said. "But how are we going to do that?"

Malfoy laughed softly. "If I were to tell you right now, you would probably charge off and try to do it on your own," he said. "It'll need to wait until I'm recovered first, so I can go with you." His smile widened, and he stared over Harry's shoulder at the wall, his fingers flexing open and shut.

"The wards on the Ministry that detect the Malfoy bloodline—"

"We'll find some way around them." Malfoy's voice was too casual for Harry's liking, but he had a different question to ask.

"The stone managed to make me consider giving you up." At the moment, nothing was more unthinkable than that, with the way Malfoy had a faint, eager flush working its way up over his cheeks, but Harry didn't see that that last observation had to be shared with the object of it. "I thought you said it couldn't affect its charisma focus."

"Not in the same way it influences everyone else, with that spell that drives them mad," Malfoy said calmly. "And it doesn't want to kill you, because its power ends if you're dead. But it can make you consider not fighting it. It can try to drown your horror in apathy, your rage in despair." He arched an eyebrow. "Sound familiar?"

Harry began to steadily swear, words he had learned from Snape and words that he'd heard Dudley use when his parents were away. Saying this many crude words in a row wasn't something he'd ever done before; Hermione would intervene with pleas for him to stop before he got that far. But it felt good, and Malfoy stood listening to him with evident pleasure.

"I'm so angry," Harry whispered at last, when the last curse had escaped from his lips, leaving them raw and his throat aching and his emotions only a little subdued.

"Good." Malfoy's voice was thick and low. "I like you angry."

Harry snapped his head up. There was something—off—about the intensity in Malfoy's voice, and about the greedy way in which he surveyed Harry now. No, the _proprietary _way, Harry thought.

"That will make it easier to destroy the stone," Malfoy explained, not seeming to notice Harry's increased scrutiny.

Harry licked his lips. He had no plans to be suspicious of Malfoy at this point, because he had correctly predicted the involvement of the Troublestone and he was the only person Harry knew who was willing to destroy it.

But it might not hurt to keep an eye on him.

"Yes," he said.

Malfoy's eyes shone with that fever-like heat again, and Harry wondered if he would so resent it if Malfoy had ulterior motives.

He lowered his eyes and frowned a moment later. Some new emotion was stirring in him, thick and complex and many-edged as the light that had flickered around the Troublestone. He couldn't tell what it was, and that worried him.

_But at least it's new._


	4. Recklessness

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Four—Recklessness_

Harry opened his eyes with a gasp. He'd awakened from a hot, stifling dream where he lay under a green canopy with someone—he hadn't been able to tell if the canopy was leaves or a blanket, though if they were leaves, surely they came from a jungle—and kissed them and bit their throat. That was the strangest thing; he had known he was lying with a person, but no more than that. Sometimes his dream-lover had Ginny's face, sometimes the face of an imaginary person who was quietly indignant along with him about the way the wizarding world was going, but always before he'd been able to see who it was.

He wondered what it meant, now, that he couldn't.

He sat up in bed for a moment, tense, listening. Had something awakened him? He often imagined noises—thumps, yells, the sounds of Death Eaters breaking in—and had to make a tour of the flat with his wand lit just to reassure himself that no one was hiding in the cupboards.

In this case, silence thrummed around him for long seconds before he heard it again. A muffled thud, a sobbing cry. Harry was out of bed and halfway across the room when he realized he was only wearing pants. He shrugged impatiently and kept running. He'd had some training in learning to ignore little obstructions like nakedness.

He'd finally moved Malfoy into the drawing room and put him on the couch after Malfoy had made a sarcastic little remark about not wanting to kick Harry out of bed. Harry had taken him at his word. He felt so worn-out from the unexpected emotions running through him that he didn't want to spend another night on the couch, which had a spring that poked him continually in the back. Let Malfoy lie on it and think of sarcastic remarks that he could use to the next person who tried to help him.

Malfoy, of course, had worn a dissatisfied look, as if Harry taking him at his word was not what he wanted after all, but Harry hadn't thought there would be worse consequences for him than a sore back.

Now it seemed there were. He was thrashing back and forth, screaming in a high, heartbreaking voice for someone to stop. Harry swallowed as he thought about what he might be dreaming of. He reached out and caught Malfoy's wrists, gently, meaning to bring them down and pin them to his sides.

Malfoy immediately went mad, lashing and kicking with his legs, twisting his head as if his neck was broken. Then, before Harry could take his hands away, something even worse happened. He simply tilted his head back and let his body go rigid. He was baring his belly, his throat, his groin, all his vulnerable places. It was the posture of a man who would let his captors do whatever they liked, as long as the pain stopped.

Harry, breathless and blinded with tears, hurt somewhere in the center of his bones that something like this had happened to Malfoy, learned down without thought and gathered Malfoy into an embrace. He slung the taller man halfway into his lap and cradled him against his chest, whispering, "It'll be all right, it's fine, I'm here, you got away from them and survived, I'm here."

Malfoy stayed rigid for long, terrifying moments. Then he slumped forwards and moaned. The moaning continued in broken sobs until Harry finally managed to distinguish words. "I'm so _tired._"

"I know," Harry whispered into his ear. His tears were making him blink frantically. It sounded as though someone had taken all his own emotions from the past year and condensed them into Malfoy's voice.

"Sometimes I want to lie down and never move again," Malfoy said. "I'm tired of fighting. I'm tired of trying so hard. Who could blame me? Let someone else save the world for a change. It _hurts._ I want it to stop hurting."

"It will," Harry said, rocking him, his own head bowed so that his nose rested in the crook of Malfoy's neck, between his throat and his collarbone. The skin was slick beneath his cheek and nose, soaked with sweat and tears. "It will get better."

"When?"

Harry felt Malfoy's fingers dig into him as he hissed the desperate question, and he could respond only one way.

"Soon," he said, sinking his nose deeper, breathing in the scent of hopelessness and fear, wishing he could take it into his lungs and exhale hope and delight. "I'm with you now. We're going to _make _it better."

Malfoy quivered once, and then he woke. Harry felt the way his breathing steadied and his head turned in small flinches to look about him. His hands tightened on Harry's shoulders, and he said, "You said _we._"

"I did at that." Harry didn't point out Malfoy had made him say "we" earlier that day. It wasn't the time. He had only begun to understand how much that word might mean to Malfoy, and he didn't need it torn down and mocked. He continued to stroke up and down Malfoy's back, and inhale the scent of salt off his shoulder.

"We're going to make it better," Malfoy repeated, as though he were learning a precious lesson. He shoved himself a little more insistently against Harry and closed his eyes. Harry felt his breathing even out again.

Harry frowned. He didn't think the couch was big enough for both of them to stay there indefinitely, and if he fell asleep here he would wake up with a sore back and neck from clutching at Malfoy, which would be a bad thing if he had to move fast—

_Oh. Of course._

Malfoy's reluctance to leave him in sole possession of the bed earlier was now clear.

Harry managed to stand up. Malfoy continued to lie against him as if asleep. Harry didn't know if he really was. He didn't think Malfoy would acknowledge any questions either way. He began to shuffle slowly towards his bed, maneuvering Malfoy awkwardly around the end of the table and then around the edges of the kitchen counter.

At last they were back in the bedroom again, and Harry rolled Malfoy into the bed. He forgot to take into account Malfoy's strong clutch on him, though, and so he fell, too. He was suddenly blinking at the wall from his pillow, and Malfoy's hair tickled his nose and made him want to sneeze.

Far more important, though, was the wave of relaxation that swept across him and pressed his eyes shut with gentle fingers.

The bed really was big enough for both of them.

* * *

Harry woke from another dream of heat into a reality of heat. Malfoy lay next to him, propped up on one elbow, studying him as if he were a painting Malfoy intended to copy. He reached out a hand when he saw Harry was awake and ran a finger down his cheek.

"We're going after the Troublestone today," he said. His voice was perfectly calm, almost indifferent. He joined a second finger to the first and pressed Harry's eyes closed the way sleep had last night. "I've thought of a way, and I'm well enough to do it. I don't have much time before the Death Eaters find out where I went."

"I don't understand some things," Harry murmured. He was still relaxed, as though part of his brain had commanded his body to sleep. He didn't mind many things he thought he should have minded, like his near-nakedness or Malfoy's closeness or the way Malfoy was touching him. "How will we get around the wards that sense your blood? Why did your captors know about and recognize the Troublestone? And is it really the Ministry or the Death Eaters you fear?"

"The last question first," Malfoy said, moving so near that his breath traveled across Harry's earlobe. Harry would have turned his head to get more of it, but Malfoy's fingers on his eyes held his face still. "I fear both of them. At the moment, though, the Death Eaters are the ones who know that I escaped, so they're the ones more likely to be hunting me. And some of them still have good connections, relatives who won't turn them in or people who are bespelled into reporting to them. It's not enough to fight the Troublestone. But they know I could be a threat, and the Ministry doesn't."

"You'll tell them by sneaking into the Ministry." Harry opened his mouth. Malfoy slipped a finger into it, tracing the edges of his teeth. He found, unerringly, the scar on the inside of his cheek where Harry had bitten down during Kingsley's speech the year before that praised the Aurors for their good work in tracking hidden Death Eaters. He'd done that so he wouldn't scream, but he'd bitten too deep and left his teeth in the wound too long, and the Healers hadn't been able to rid him of the scar. Malfoy stroked the mark as though he had been there to see it happen. "Is that what you want?" Harry added, tongue moving awkwardly around the finger.

"They will have to know in time," Malfoy said, and his fingers moved off Harry's eyes and along his cheeks. They stroked the line on the edge of Harry's throat where he'd been hit by a Decapitating Curse from a Death Eater—a real one, not a poor man or woman condemned to Azkaban for no reason and desperate to protect his or her freedom. The curse hadn't hit directly, but it had still hurt, and once again the Healers hadn't been able to mend the wound completely. "They will have to join the Death Eaters in knowledge."

Harry heard himself moan from a distance, detached. He thought it was Malfoy's strange, half-poetic way of speaking as much as his touches that were making him feel like this.

"My captors knew about the Troublestone because they studied Dark history, and for the same reason I do." Malfoy ran a finger around and around the scar on his throat. "They're part of the ones being hunted. The Troublestone can't bind them in its spell. They have a chance to recognize it. That doesn't mean they would always be right if they made the guess, mind. Sometimes disasters and mob-minds happen to the wizarding world on their own.

"And we'll get around the wards that sense my blood using Dark Arts, of course." His finger traced up Harry's cheek and settled at last on his lightning bolt scar. "I trust you have no objection?"

Harry opened his eyes and stared in a daze up at those gray ones, brilliant and bleak as a sea-cliff.

"No," he said.

"Good." Malfoy's breath on his mouth and fingertip on his scar both burned.

* * *

Harry walked towards the Ministry. Malfoy followed behind him under his Invisibility Cloak. Though he insisted the Dark spell would protect them, Harry had insisted in return on going through the front entrance. The strongest wards were there. If they could bypass those, the spell could fool anything in the Ministry.

Harry felt as if he were moving along on parade. His limbs were stiff and jerky as a puppet's. His hair was thick with sweat. That spell that thrummed back and forth like a taut cord between him and Malfoy might as well have been a sign around his neck, he thought, proclaiming, _I'm a traitor! Look at me! Look at me!_

But no one turned to look at him with any suspicion. There were a few friendly nods and smiles, and others graced him with the usual sweep of eyes that seemed to try to absorb heroism off him with one glance. Harry clenched his teeth. _I'm not the one you want to look to for that. Look at Draco Malfoy's scars, and then tell me that no one who was on the other side of the war knows anything about being a hero._

They stepped into the phonebox and began to jerk their way down. Harry felt the brush of a hand across his shoulder to reassure him that Malfoy was still with him—in fact, very close.

Harry's face burned for a moment as he thought of the way they had awakened in the bed that morning, and the way Malfoy had touched him. When he was showering, the strange spell the mood had cast on him had worn off, and now he was beyond mortified. What did _that _mean, anyway? Did Malfoy carry some dangerous personal enchantment about him that he started with his touch? Harry hadn't seen any wand on him since Malfoy arrived, but maybe the desperate need to survive had accented his wandless and nonverbal abilities.

The phonebox came to a stop. Harry took a long, soothing breath, realized he didn't know how it could soothe him when he stood an excellent chance of being taken to Azkaban in the next few moments, and then stepped forwards.

The wards flickered over him, and over Malfoy, who followed like a shadow, but not so softly that Harry couldn't hear his footsteps.

Nothing happened.

Harry began to really breathe again. The spell had worked. Malfoy had explained that it would create a connection between them, a constant transfusion of blood and genetic material—at least, he had called it that after Harry explained the concept of genetics to him—leaping back and forth between their bodies and mixing and scattering itself so that the wards would not be able to tell Harry from Malfoy. Harry had blinked and wondered aloud if the spell wasn't dangerous, if it was performing an active transfer back and forth between them.

Malfoy tossed him a withering glance and snapped, "Why do you think they decided it was Dark Arts?" Which made so much sense that Harry was willing to shut up and go along for the ride.

And it had worked. Harry stopped for a moment to lean against the wall and rub his watery legs. His breath was hoarse in his ears.

Malfoy leaned an elbow on Harry's shoulder. He started, but the arm crept downwards and wrapped around his torso. Harry had little choice but to tilt his head back and listen to the words Malfoy whispered in his ear. He hoped anyone who passed would think he was tired and just taking the chance to rest himself.

"I have to get near the Troublestone and study its defenses again."

"What?" Harry hissed, barely remembering to keep his voice down. He missed being in the flat, where he could speak with Malfoy all he liked and not have to worry about who was listening in. "I thought you said you learned everything you needed to know from my Pensieve memory."

"It turns out I didn't," Malfoy said, unfazed. "So. There may be other protections, ones I didn't see, on the corridor outside the courtroom. I need you to create a distraction for me so I can safely bypass them."

"Separate from you?"

"Yes." Malfoy's fingers curled briefly, digging into the material of Harry's robes. Harry assumed it was his replacement for a roll of his eyes, which would be less than effective with his face under the Invisibility Cloak.

"But I thought you said the spell wouldn't allow us to go far from one another—"

"When outside," Malfoy said patiently. "In the same building, it will. Don't Apparate out of here without me, though. I doubt you would like the way in which your veins and your bones would open."

"I can't Apparate out of the Ministry anyway." Harry crossed his arms over his chest.

"Then don't _Floo._" Malfoy's voice cracked a little, and Harry realized for the first time how nervous he must be. That made the balance in him tilt back towards confidence, as if they stood on either side of a weighted scale. He reached up and clasped the hand resting on his chest, giving it a little squeeze.

"I won't," he whispered. "Where should we meet, and in what time?"

"If I can't learn what I need in an hour, I doubt I'll be able to learn it," Malfoy answered. "Meet me by the lifts to the lower floors." And then he turned and slid off down the corridor. Harry listened to his footsteps as long as he could hear them, which wasn't for more than a few paces. Then he tried to ignore the lingering sense of emptiness that filled him and concentrate on the distraction he was going to create.

He had to discard a few impulses to raise alarms about Death Eaters. If he did that, Kingsley would probably check even more wards that he didn't know about and find Malfoy. So it would have to be something else.

Harry paused for a moment, his mind weighing the consequences of the plan he had just come up with. He began to smile. He knew it was a grim smile, but, well, Malfoy was no longer around to make comments on his expressions.

_The Troublestone gave me a virtual immunity to the trouble it's creating so it could use the love people had for my supposed heroism, didn't it? Time to take advantage of that, for the first time. _

Harry did have to suppress a feeling of filthiness. He felt that taking advantage of people under a spell was far more wrong than rebelling against the Ministry or rescuing Malfoy as he had done. But even if he tried to tell them the truth right now, it would do no good. He hoped they would forgive him if this action helped release them from their mental prison.

He aimed his wand carefully at the rebuilt Fountain of Magical Brethren, which occupied the Atrium of the Ministry. It had been sculpted so that a single wizard hovered above the other creatures, including Muggles, his arms spread and a benevolent look on his face. His features were a mixture of Dumbledore's and Harry's. If you looked closely, which Harry only had the second time he'd seen it, you realized that he was stepping, hard, on the body of a man with a Dark Mark on his arm.

Hermione had said that the need to see such a statue was "understandable psychology" after the war. Harry thought now that was another warning sign of the Troublestone's presence. The real Hermione would have been horrified at the way the wizard overshadowed the house-elves and centaurs and goblins on the fountain, let alone the way he trampled on another human being.

Harry whispered the spell he had chosen. A streak of light like a firework shot away from his wand and impacted with the fountain.

And the fountain exploded.

Harry flung an arm over his face as gold and water and marble and silver flew at him. A moment later, he wondered why he hadn't constructed a Shield Charm. It certainly would have worked better than bare skin to protect him from the crumbs of stone and metal raining on him now. Maybe he thought he deserved the punishment for not acting for so long, for letting things get this bad.

Maybe he wanted some scars of his own.

One twisted shard of gold sliced a deep line down his arm and made the blood flow. Harry hissed at the pain of it and cast a healing spell at once, not knowing what wounds might do to his blood connection with Malfoy. But though he waited tensely a moment, nothing seemed to happen. At least, no one raised the alarm of a Death Eater in the Ministry.

They raised a different kind of alarm instead.

"_Harry!_" Hermione came hurtling out of a side corridor and grabbed him around the middle, squeezing him hard. "What happened? Did someone make the fountain explode to try and assassinate you?" She turned around, wand clasped tightly in a sweaty hand, eyes staring suspiciously at the other people rushing in. She barely relaxed when she saw Ron, Harry noted.

All his anger with the Troublestone came back in a rush, and Harry was glad he had chosen this kind of distraction. If nothing else, it gave him a means to express his rage to someone other than Malfoy.

"No one tried to hurt me," he said, in a voice that he didn't have to strive to make low and dangerous. "I tried to hurt myself."

Hermione froze. When she turned around, the look of distress on her face was, Harry was certain, real, but he couldn't tell how much came from the thought of losing a friend and how much from the thought of losing a hero. He hated the Troublestone more then, with a hatred that made a churning maelstrom of his gut, for having the power to make him doubt one of his best friends.

"But why?" Hermione whispered. "Harry, we all love you, you know that. Whatever you need, we'll provide it. Whatever you want, you'll have it."

"I can't _stand _it anymore!" Harry shouted, raising his voice and causing Hermione to jump. He backed away from her, making sure he was the center of a circle of fascinated eyes. "The way everyone fawns on me, the way everyone smiles at me even when I behave like a deranged idiot! Haven't you _thought _about what I've done since the war? Almost nothing. It's idiocy that I became an Auror so fast, when better-qualified candidates were left out in the cold. It's idiocy that everyone continues to honor me as a hero, when I haven't _kept on _being a hero. You can't do something good once and then be honored for it the rest of your life."

"Harry." Hermione's eyes were filled with tears, and if he hadn't seen the Troublestone with his own eyes, Harry didn't think he could have kept up the anger in the face of those tears. She stepped towards him with her hand reaching out. "You died to save us. You saved the _whole world_, because Voldemort would have gone after Muggles like my parents next, and other wizards, if he'd won in Britain. Of course that deserves honor for the rest of your life. Which of the rest of us did something like that?"

"And if you made the fountain explode from stress," Ron said from the side, stepping around the ruins of it to smile at Harry, "well, that's no more than I've wanted to do myself, mate. Damn ugly thing."

Harry opened his mouth to reply, encouraged to note that the crowd of people come to watch him have a temper tantrum was still swelling, but just then Kingsley's voice interrupted, sharp with excitement.

"Ron! Harry! We have him! We captured him!"

Harry spun around. Kingsley was standing near the entrance to the lifts, and behind him were two of the taller Aurors. Stripped of the Invisibility Cloak, hanging between them, bruised and bleeding and nearly unconscious, was Malfoy.

"We don't know how he fooled the wards that detected the Malfoy bloodline to get this far into the Ministry," Kingsley said, his words tumbling over each other as he spoke, "but whatever magic he used, it failed. Suddenly the wards alerted us, and we were able to freeze him in place until we could capture him." He glanced over his shoulder at Malfoy, his back stiff with satisfaction. "And we've given him a preliminary treatment for what he'll be able to expect when he gets to Azkaban."

_That was my fault, _Harry thought, as he stood there among drifting dust and crumbled stone and the cheers of people he knew, who sounded as if they were baying like hungry wolves. _I thought I was being so clever, because no one else was in the Atrium just then and destroying the fountain would only hurt me. But it must have disrupted the connection of the blood spell between us. _

_I hurt him._

Frustration and fear and fury seized Harry and tore him apart like dogs savaging a corpse. He couldn't _stand _this. He couldn't _bear _it if Malfoy were to lift his head and look at him with silent accusation in his eyes.

He cast a Blasting Curse at Kingsley.


	5. Fury

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Five—Fury_

The curse took Kingsley neatly in the upper chest, throwing him backwards in a parallel line to Malfoy and the Aurors who held him. Harry heard shocked gasps and saw hurried movements out of the corner of his eye, but what registered was the way Malfoy's head rose as if someone had called his name.

And Harry knew, then, that he had crossed a line, and that there was no going back.

He moved without thought, because allowing himself time to think would have allowed his enemies time to gauge his actions. He waved his wand, and the rubble of the fountain, metal and stone and water, rose and began to whirl in a cloud with a pointed tip, like pictures of tornadoes that Harry had seen. Another gesture, and the cloud moved between him and Hermione. She was the closest to him at the moment and the one who might interfere the worst, because Harry was not sure he could bring himself to hurt her even if she hurt Malfoy.

_But you hurt Kingsley, didn't you? And he's your friend, too, and as much a victim of the spell as she is._

Harry buried the thought again, and sent the cloud driving straight at the Aurors who held Malfoy. As he had hoped they would, they dropped their prisoner's arms to back away and draw their wands, concentrating on the mass of the broken fountain. Harry whispered another spell, and a stray wind broke away from the rubble to hover behind Malfoy, holding him up comfortingly, since it didn't seem he could support himself.

The silent, staring crowd began to recover.

"He's been possessed!" someone called. Harry told himself that he didn't really recognize Hermione's voice. "Malfoy's done something to him! Get him, take his wand away, but don't hurt him!"

"And kill Malfoy," added someone else, in a voice that Harry told himself was not Ron's.

Harry screamed out a curse he had learned from a book in the days when the Ministry's insistence on using dangerous Dark spells had seemed justifiable, the only right thing to do against Death Eaters who might commit any number of crimes and would follow no rules in battle. A star-shaped pattern of cracks spread across the ceiling. Chunks of marble and granite and basalt began to come down, crashing into hastily built Shield Charms and the statues and doorframes that the crowd hurried to shelter behind.

Harry spared a last desperate hope that he would not hurt anyone innocent of the Ministry's crimes.

And then the battle began in earnest, and he had no more time for prayers, sincere or not.

The white light of a silencing curse flew past Harry. He ignored it; he could restore his own voice nonverbally if he had to, and for the moment the more important thing was raising a Shield Charm over Malfoy. He doubted that any three other people in the room, even working together, could break through one of his _Protego_ spells.

The air in front of Malfoy flashed and turned sideways, becoming the brilliant shield. Stone slammed into it and cracked, falling away. The shield spread out into a shimmering cocoon encasing Malfoy, who still stared at him with an expression of stunned astonishment on his face. Harry hoped that would be enough.

He really had no more time to spare.

Another silencing curse passed him, and then something slammed him in the back and flung him to his knees. The world swam dizzily. Harry recognized a spell that was supposed to knock him unconscious, no doubt so they could take his wand away from him and put him "safely" in St. Mungo's.

Then a falling desk from the floor above caught him on the edge of the head.

Harry grabbed onto awareness and held it tight with both hands as he rolled away from the desk, colors splashing and swirling in front of him. He could _not _collapse and get away from the pain by seeking refuge in sleep, no matter how great the temptation. They would capture Malfoy that way, and they would prevent him from doing anything else to make up for his mistakes. But he needed something to keep him on his feet—

Anger licked up the sides of his mind in devouring flames and became fury.

Harry saw a shape above him. He didn't know if it was a friend—as much as that word meant right now—and he didn't care. He lifted his wand and murmured, "_Cessus._"

The figure went flying away from him as if caught around the middle by an enormous butterfly net. Harry stood. There was blood on the back of his head and running in a sticky trail down the side of his neck. He didn't care. So long as it didn't get onto his wand hand and make his grip slippery, then he could keep battling.

He darted a glance to the side and saw three witches working together to take down the Shield Charm around Malfoy. It was already showing considerable cracks. Malfoy stood in the middle of them with his chin held high, but he was wandless and couldn't do anything if they broke through.

Rage slithered through Harry and bit down into his heart with all the force Nagini had used to destroy Snape. "_Exercitus!_" he snarled at the witches, gesturing savagely from side to side, a spell that he hadn't performed before even in play.

The air above their heads, in the middle of one of the cracks in the ceiling, turned dark and bulged. The bulges split down the middle and dropped out swarm after swarm of glittering black hornets, which made a screaming noise as they rushed down on the witches. In moments the witches were screaming in turn, flapping frantically at the hornets with ineffective bare hands and casting spells to try and turn them away. As more swarms were still coming forth from the crack in the ceiling and attacking them from every undefended angle, that wouldn't work any time soon.

Harry grinned. He thought he could feel his lips crack and drip bloody foam as he did so. Or maybe the bloody foam was already there from the wounds he'd sustained. He didn't know. He didn't think he cared. His blood was up and his heart was surging and he wanted to _hurt _all the people who had tortured people like Malfoy and looked away when vengeance instead of justice was taken and subjected magical creatures like house-elves to evil in the months since the Troublestone arrived.

"Harry…"

He turned around. Hermione stood behind him, her face fixed in an expression of horror. The look impacted Harry less than it would have otherwise done. The fury was rushing like a wall of flames between him and every normal emotion.

He'd put up with things too long. Now he was on the other side, and the world spun around him as he fell into the abyss.

"How could you do this, mate?" Ron was hovering beside Hermione, face ashen. "For the sake of Malfoy, no less?"

Harry curled his lip and started to answer, but someone moved towards him from the side, and if Ron and Hermione weren't serving as a distraction for the Auror, they were at least not planning to help Harry against him. Harry faced him fully and flicked his wrist. "_Suptilis!_"

The man's body began to thin, growing paler as Harry watched, stretching towards the corners of the room like a fine-spun thread. He had some hours to counter the spell before he faded away completely, but still, he had other things to think about than attacking right now, as his wand dropped to the floor through fingers that barely existed. Harry laughed.

"He's not Harry anymore," Ron said, as though in response to that display of magic or maybe in response to something Hermione had said. "I think we can safely assume that. Besides, we'd be _helping _him." And Harry felt the familiar sensation of Ron's magic uncoiling to attack, though this time form the other side.

He turned to face them again, cracking out a Shield Charm that rebounded back the Stunner Ron sent at him. For a moment the room seemed to open around him, and he was back in the Room of Requirement in their fifth year, facing Ron in a Dumbledore's Army training exercise.

This was more serious than that. But that knowledge had become as powerless as Hermione's disappointment in him. Harry knew his friends couldn't help what they were doing. On the other hand, if he stood back and simply let things happen around him instead of trying to take an active part in them, then he would be responsible for more torture like Malfoy's.

He would not _hurt _Ron and Hermione. But neither would he allow them to capture or disable him.

He moved faster than Ron in Defense Against the Dark Arts, always had. And Hermione was better at reading about unusual spells than she was about putting them into practice. It had been Harry who spent most of his free time during the last year testing the spells she discovered, especially because it was one of the few things that could hold his interest when the Troublestone was infecting him with apathy. He had practiced diligently with hexes and jinxes that didn't cross the line into curses, telling himself that he never knew when he might need them.

He needed them now.

It was like a dance. Ron and Hermione worked together to isolate him, to trip him, to Stun him, to crack his Shield Charm and put him out of commission. Harry worked to knock them unconscious and force them onto the defensive.

His skin tingled and his breath rushed and his limbs worked so fast that he could feel dim foreshadowing of the aches he'd have tomorrow traveling up and down his body. His hair got in his eyes. Blood got in them. Harry shook his head impatiently and threw himself into the fight again. He didn't think he had to worry about another Auror attacking from the side, not when they stood as much of a chance of hitting Ron and Hermione as they did of striking him.

Back and forth, around and to the sides—Harry lost track of the steps as he performed them, as he destroyed Ron's Shield Charm and made Hermione hop back several steps into a new position that would partially allow Ron to protect her. He aimed for their knees, their wand hands, their shoulders, places that would not be crippling but would allow him to push them out of the fight. He _had _to do this. Sweat streamed into his eyes and joined the blood, but he didn't care. He could feel the balance of the battle tipping. They were getting closer and closer to the moment when the momentum would collapse into Ron and Hermione and the offensive advantage would be on his side.

"_Harry!_"

He knew that was Malfoy's voice without knowing how he knew. He fell to one knee without pause, though he couldn't be sure the warning was for that, and a Stunner flew over his head and slammed into Ron, knocking him unconscious.

_So someone wasn't afraid to aim after all, _Harry thought. _Much good it did them. _He called "_Expelliarmus!_", and Hermione's wand came soaring towards him. Harry caught it and stuck it in his pocket. If they tried to track and destroy his wand with some of the fancy spells they'd been setting up, it would do him good to have a backup.

He turned back, still on one knee, and waved his wand in the quick motion one used to Vanish the corrupted products of unsuccessful Transfiguration in McGonagall's class, thought wiped out by knowledge of what happened next. "_Expelliarmus plurimus!_" He didn't know that was an actual spell, but it seemed a reasonable extension of one.

Every other wand in the room flew towards him; he was pelted by a veritable rain of them. Harry snatched the ones he could reach and bundled them into his robes. He hoped Kingsley's was among them. The Minister had the authority to forbid destruction of his wand, or should, no matter what curses it was used to cast.

Then he stood up and moved towards Malfoy.

Malfoy watched him with eyes so sharp that Harry avoided them after that first glimpse and kept his attention on the wand motions he was using to reverse the Shield Charm. At last it was gone and Malfoy took a step forwards, not so much sagging into his arms as resting on them. Harry could feel those eyes slicing apart his excuses and lies from a few inches away. And the devastating thing was, he wasn't even sure _what _excuses and lies he would have to oppose to Malfoy's skeptical gaze.

"Do you still have the Invisibility Cloak?" he murmured, and Summoned it when Malfoy shook his head. It unfolded itself from the robe of one of the dazed Auror guards. Harry stuffed it into his own pocket and took a moment to look around the Atrium.

Broken again, he thought, the fountains and statues thoroughly smashed, just as it had been after Dumbledore's battle with Voldemort here in their fifth year, and again after the Ministry had rebuilt in the wake of the war, replacing the demented statues established during the reign of Umbridge and her ilk. Really, they shouldn't have a monument here at all, Harry thought, or at least not one to wizarding superiority.

"Did you learn what you needed to know?" he murmured into Malfoy's ear. He didn't think anyone was close or conscious enough to hear, but he had already betrayed enough of Malfoy's confidences for one day.

For long moments, Malfoy didn't answer; instead, his hands moved over Harry's shoulders and collarbone as if he'd lost his sight and needed to renew his familiarity with Harry's body. Harry shivered and stood to attention, unable to relax as the cold fingers brushed lightly at the nape of his neck and then curled into the hollow of his throat and rested on the pulse that beat there.

"They caught me returning," Malfoy said at last, "not on the way down." He tilted his head back, and Harry saw that he was wearing an uncomfortable smile, more like a slash across his mouth. "Yes, I've learned what I needed to know. About everything." He pressed closer to Harry, head cocked now at an angle that had to hurt, his thumbs pressing down into Harry's shoulder blades.

"Well, good," Harry muttered, unsure now what he felt in the wake of his dying rage. He did stare into several corners of the Atrium, imprinting the images of the destruction he'd wrought on his brain. If he was going to act, if he was going to be a traitor and a rebel, he ought not to hide from the sight of what he'd done. He'd hurt people. He might have killed some of them.

There would be a reckoning for that. At the very least, when the Troublestone was defeated, Harry knew he would have to come back to the Ministry and turn himself in as a war criminal. It was the right thing to do, and consequences kept from falling right now would not stay away forever.

"What are you doing?" Malfoy's voice was high and harsh, as if he wanted to be away from the Ministry and had already told Harry that several times. Perhaps he had. Harry had been filling his mind with the sight of people covered with stings and Hermione's silently weeping face, not the sounds next to him. "Come away."

Harry turned and walked out of the Ministry, Malfoy matching him step for step. Harry was uncertain whether he could actually walk on his own, but if so, he didn't seem interested in doing it.

* * *

Harry Apparated them to Number Twelve Grimmauld Place. Of course his flat would be the first place they would look when they managed to recover from their shock, and the Black house was as safe as any other in Britain. Ron and Hermione would probably remember its existence, but Harry, because he was paranoid, had replaced the Fidelius Charm and made Dennis Creevey, who'd moved out of Britain and was honored to be asked, the Secret-Keeper. Harry doubted that Ron and Hermione would think to ask Dennis. Besides, Dennis ought to be beyond the influence of the Troublestone, perhaps even horrified by what had been going on; the last owl Harry had received from him, a few months ago, had contained a few sentences about how "things had certainly changed" and not much else.

Harry stepped into the house and closed his eyes, leaning Malfoy carefully against the wall for a moment. These last few steps, he had acted as if really couldn't stand on his own, leaning heavily against Harry and catching his gaze every chance he got, so Harry would take him upstairs and lay him on a bed as soon as he could. But right now, he needed a short space of time to recover.

He didn't receive it. A hand on his cheek made him open his eyes. Malfoy was leaning towards him, eyes so wide and blank that they looked like the eyes of someone dead by drowning, his mouth slightly parted and his motion containing a sort of awful inevitability about it.

Before Harry knew what was happening, Malfoy fastened his mouth on Harry's and began to kiss him. His tongue intruded the way his finger had that morning. Harry's teeth parted around it in the same helpless way. Malfoy stepped closer yet and curved a leg around to kick Harry's ankles apart. He was making a subdued keening noise in the back of his throat, and his lips clung to Harry's as if he were sucking poison out of a wound.

Harry raised a hand without knowing what he would do with it. His fingers ended up tucked behind Draco's head, threading through his hair. He pulled his face closer, to see if that would change the kiss, and Draco moaned and opened his mouth so wide that Harry gasped. Yes, the angle of his head changed things.

His glasses were fogging from the mingling of their breaths. His emotions still tumbled through him like children turning somersaults, and he didn't know if he felt confused, angry, exhilarated, or something else entirely. He kissed and lapped, his own tongue tracing paths that were slimy from the movement of Draco's, and thought that at any moment the strangeness would end and Draco would step away.

But he'd lost track of what Draco's other hand, the one not gripping his cheek, was doing. His eyes widened and he gasped deeply, though there was nothing to inhale but more wetness and more warmth, when fingers curled around his cock.

Draco snarled into his mouth and flattened his palm out a moment later, holding it still. Harry realized he had shoved his groin forwards and was grinding against that flat palm of his own free will. He was also keening in the back of his throat, the way Draco had keened when he kissed him a moment ago.

That _did _confuse him enough to make him wonder if they shouldn't stop. Somehow, he had never thought that lying mostly naked with Draco in bed and taking his finger into his mouth might result in this. He leaned his head back on the wall and gasped a few breaths of clear air before Draco's mouth found him again. He tried to say, "Malfoy—"

"Never saw anything like it," Draco whispered. "Not alone any longer. You'll come with me, you'll be with me—"

"Yes, but that doesn't mean—" Harry began, arguments springing up in his head. There was a difference between assaulting the Ministry together and doing _this _together.

Then he met Draco's narrowed, gleaming gray eyes, as hard as flagstones, and felt himself drown. He moaned before Draco reintroduced his tongue to his mouth, and fumbled down for the erection he could feel pressing against his hip. He juggled it awkwardly through cloth, shifting so that the wall gave him balance.

His hand got jammed in Draco's robes and he couldn't reach flesh, but he could still stroke and watch the light in those strange eyes leap and glimmer. It came and went like flame, and Draco's groans traveling past his ear had the sound of pain in them. A tearing sensation exploded through Harry's chest, rather like the way he'd felt when the fury first began to consume him in the Ministry.

_How long has it been since someone has done this for him? As long as it's been for me? Longer? _

Harry felt angry to think of it, as he was angry about Draco's wounds, as he was angry about Draco's nightmares. He could change things. He could make things better. He shoved up from the wall, readjusting his position so that both hands were clasped around Draco's erection now, stroking and teasing as much as he could when robes still separated them. Draco shivered, and for a moment his head rolled as if it would sag back on his neck. But then he braced a forearm across Harry's chest and recovered his balance.

Harry looked down. The forearm was the left one, and the sleeve had slid back enough so that he could see the Dark Mark.

Surely that was the time for clarity to strike him, if it ever would. Instead, Harry bowed his head and flicked his tongue across the snake. The skin felt colder than normal and rough under his tongue, like a scarred stone.

Draco cried out. His chest was heaving so fast now that Harry would have feared for his life if he didn't know what was causing it. He pushed his tongue insistently into the kiss until Harry almost gagged and came like that, so Harry knew of his orgasm mostly because of the wetness against his fingers and the trembling gasps in his mouth.

Harry kept his hand where it was, thinking that it might be over, that Draco might pull back and walk away. It would make as much sense as anything that had happened since he'd rescued Draco from Gingerbrats.

Instead, Draco began to stroke him again. Harry caught his breath, or tried to. He couldn't, really. He was panting, and Draco's tongue traced the outline of his lips as he added his other hand to the motions, pulling and spiraling up the length of Harry's cock. Harry tossed his head back and hissed.

Draco's hand clasped the back of his neck and pulled him into the kiss again. His tongue thrust, twice, denting Harry's cheeks and rasping across his teeth.

Harry cried out and came, body and mind overwhelmed by an image of an act he'd never fantasized about before. But now he thought he knew what it would be like, and the climax that tore through him sealed and branded it with pleasure for a sign. Harry felt his legs shake with longing and aftershock and knew he wanted to experience what Draco's tongue had imitated, and soon.

Draco's hands both rose to the back of his neck and rubbed there, the fingers making soothing circles. He stepped closer, fitting his knee into the cradle of Harry's groin and making him whine as his spent cock gave a twitch and the sticky mess of his come shifted.

His mouth never relinquished Harry's, the kiss drawing him further and further in, a riptide in a cold sea.


	6. Uncertainty

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Six—Uncertainty_

Malfoy wouldn't stop touching him.

Harry had fallen into bed the first moment he could after Malfoy had stopped sucking on his mouth and permitted him to go upstairs. His thoughts were whirling as fast as the battle in the Ministry had gone, and he desperately needed some time to _think, _to try and sort out what had happened to him, including the battle with his best friends, into a set of actions he could comprehend and accept.

He was not going to contemplate what had happened with Malfoy. After all, it had a fairly simple heading in his mind: _What the fuck did you think you were doing?_

But his plans hadn't included a Malfoy who was neither embarrassed nor impressed by what they had done, and who wouldn't stop touching Harry. He followed him to the bedroom and stood with one hand lightly on Harry's shoulder whilst Harry cast a spell to banish the dust. He followed him into the loo and leaned against him, arms draped around his waist, his hands sliding idly back and forth on the curves of Harry's hips as though he couldn't believe he hadn't learned them already. Harry ended up casting a Cleaning Charm instead of taking a shower as he had planned. God only knew what his unwise body would decide to do next if he was naked in front of Malfoy.

Harry really couldn't blame Malfoy for any of it, he decided as he walked back into the bedroom, just a little too fast for Malfoy to keep an arm around him the way he obviously wanted to. He'd been on edge for Merlin knew how long, and had become used to snatching his comfort and pleasure where he could find it. He'd probably had other hasty gropes with other people that had resulted in orgasm. For him, this experience would only be a continuation of the nightmare he'd dropped into the day the Ministry had outlawed him.

But for Harry, it was different. He didn't _do_ things like that. Since he'd broken up with Ginny, he hadn't had sex at all. When he allowed himself to remember his days with her, at least the days before the Troublestone, they were soft and warm, filled with the fine-spun wool of teasing and the bright words of love confessions. Harry had needed touching from her, if only because he'd wanted reassurance that she wanted him for more than his name and scar.

_That's not a problem here, _a cheerful and slightly mad voice said in his mind. _You know Malfoy doesn't give a damn about your name and your scar. Any person willing to rescue him and fight with him will do._

_And willing to provide a warm body for him. _

Well, Harry had no intention of doing that last. He climbed into bed, and Malfoy followed. When he tried to drape an arm around Harry's neck and exert pressure that was probably meant to make Harry face him, Harry decided this had gone far enough. He rolled with the pressure, but only so he could squeeze Malfoy's wrist and say, "There's a bedroom down the corridor."

Malfoy stared at him for a moment, lips parted. His eyes held absolute and utter surprise. Well, Harry thought charitably, he could understand that. Malfoy had probably forgotten that not everyone lived like him, and therefore the sexual encounter in the entrance hall was an aberration for Harry.

Then Malfoy laughed.

"What?" Harry snapped, bristling. He started to draw away, but Malfoy had more strength in his scarred and Marked arms than Harry had realized. Of course, he was tired from the battle, too.

"You're mine," Malfoy said, in the same tone of voice he might use to inform Harry that gravity worked.

"One orgasm does not make me yours, Malfoy," said Harry. Once again emotions he had no name for were tumbling through him, giving place to each other so fast that he really wasn't sure whether angry or pleading words would emerge from his mouth until he spoke. "That was—a one-off. An expression of our joy at being alive. That doesn't mean it needs to be repeated. We should be concentrating on how we're going to break the Troublestone, not talking about sex."

Malfoy reached out and laid a hand on Harry's chest over his heart. Harry glared at him, wondering what he meant to do. Malfoy didn't scratch him or try to tear the heart from his chest, however. He simply left his hand there and stared at Harry from beneath lowered eyelids.

"Do you hear your heart beating?" he asked softly.

"Of course I do!" Harry reached up and grasped Malfoy's hand, moving it gently but inexorably away from him. "What the—"

"I could hear it beating from a distance when I was a captive," said Malfoy, his eyes unfocused. "Or I convinced myself I could. When I lay in that dungeon, on dirty stone, my mind recoiling from inaction because of the pain and from the thought of escape because I knew I would face more pain and more enemies in the outside world, I clung to the hope that you were horrified by what the Troublestone was doing in your name instead of proud of it, the way some other leaders have been. I imagined you as the one pure thing in a world of grime and horror. I imagined that you would hold me someday, and that I could feel your arms around me and your heart beneath my hand then, when things got particularly bad. You shone for me like a bloody beacon. When I got the chance to escape, I Apparated towards the Ministry, because I was going to find you." He tilted his head back and stared at Harry with the eyes of a blind man. "I didn't care about the danger. I just knew I wanted to find you. And you came, and you rescued me." He shook his head, and now his eyes seemed to have returned to normal, but Harry had started shivering and didn't think he could stop. "Now we've shared something else I used to dream about in the dungeons, during those broken moments when I remembered the existence of pleasure. You think I'm going to let you go now? You're mad. I need you to survive."

He draped his arms around Harry and arranged Harry's limbs to his satisfaction, then closed his eyes. Harry let him do it. He was numb, unbelieving, his mind making dash after dash at the horror of what things must have been like for Malfoy and always falling back from it.

_I don't—I can't—_

_He's slightly mad, slightly broken. Should I let a claim on me that he dreamed up when he was in prison affect me that much?_

Malfoy's soft snores drifted up from his chest. Harry looked down at the mass of blond hair cradled against his skin and slowly lifted a hand. A few minutes ago, when his resolve had been strong, he knew he would have pushed Malfoy away and forbade him from cuddling any closer. But now he found himself stroking Malfoy's hair, exactly as if their association, or what they had done to each other on the ground floor of the house, made sense.

_I don't—I can't understand this. _

And then Harry had a thought that made him relax into the bed. This was, after all, temporary. Malfoy had admitted he'd made Harry into a beacon for himself during the most desperate time of his life, probably because he couldn't think of anyone else unaffected by the Troublestone who wasn't a Death Eater. He didn't have any option right now. Of course not. He _did _need Harry to survive, because his mind was disordered.

But things would be different when they defeated the Troublestone and returned the minds of the enslaved to them. Then Malfoy would have other options. His parents were dead, but he would be able to leave Harry and find someone who had suffered what he had, who could really _comprehend _that suffering instead of stand outside it, as Harry had, and only pity him.

And that made sense of the battle with his friends, as well. It was what had to happen at this point, with the Troublestone in control of everything. But it wouldn't last. Harry would have the chance to explain what had happened and reconcile with his friends.

Someday, he would laugh with Ron and Hermione again, and Malfoy would go back to being what he had always been. In the meantime, he should put up with this odd variation on the normal routine, precisely because it wouldn't last forever.

Harry felt his eyes slipping shut, and he yawned. The thoughts vanished into the back of his mind. His mind and his breathing slowed, and then he was asleep, the last sensation he was conscious of Draco's warmth pillowed against his chest.

* * *

"It doesn't have to be complicated," Harry said, trying to control his temper. "I don't need every single detail of the magical theory behind how you plan to destroy the Troublestone. But I'd like _some _of those details, so I'm not left standing around like a witless moron when we go to the Ministry."

Malfoy, clad in an altered pair of Harry's robes, raised his eyebrows and leaned back in the chair in the ground floor drawing room. Harry stood on the other side of the room from him, propped against the fireplace mantle. He had decided it was for the best if he wasn't near Malfoy and his clingy hands at any point whilst they tried to have a serious conversation. Malfoy had awakened without his sense of boundaries restored. Already this morning he had touched Harry's shoulder, his neck, his back, his waist, and his face. He never tried to use his mouth, which Harry had to be grateful for, but his hands were quite bad enough. His fingertips carried a power that immediately claimed Harry's attention, considering what those hands had done to him recently. And now he was sitting there smugly and refusing to speak the truth about how he had determined that the wards on the Troublestone weren't threats, or about how he was going to break the stone.

Malfoy stared at him, and smiled slowly, as though Harry had done something amusing and interesting both at once. Harry closed his eyes, leaned back until his head hit the wood of the mantle, and tried to control the impulse to throw something.

_At least this should dissipate any shreds of mistaken romance that might be drifting around my head, _he thought. _I don't know about Malfoy's, though. He seems to thrive on connections created in the heat of madness._

"The reason I don't want to tell you," said Malfoy reasonably, "is that the method would carry a price that _you_, in particular, would misunderstand. I'm seeking a way to phrase it that would let you understand and at the same time wouldn't have you leaping to conclusions about what I intend or what you need to do."

Harry opened his eyes to see Malfoy leaning with his elbows on his knees, his fingers rubbing lightly at his temples. He looked different when he was fully clothed and not intent on climbing inside Harry's mouth. He looked weary, battered by the wounds and lumps he'd taken, _older _than he needed to look. Harry remembered that this man was a hero, and forced himself to speak instead of snap his answer.

"Let me know when you do find the phrasing," he said. "In the meantime, how did you decide that the defenses around the Troublestone aren't going to be difficult?"

Malfoy replied with an absent tone to his voice, and Harry suspected that his mind was still working on the other problem. That didn't bother Harry; the sooner the situation was explained to him, the happier he'd be. After all, if it was complicated, that meant more time spent in Malfoy's company, and more chances for Malfoy to misunderstand the "relationship" he might think he was forging with Harry.

"I've studied enough in the past year to recognize different kinds of wards when I encounter them, and to estimate how long it will take to snap them. In this case, the wards on the courtroom itself are of wizarding creation, though the Troublestone can try to catch the mind of anyone who enters the place, as it did with you. I suspect that the Troublestone couldn't have gained so much prominence so quickly if it used its own magic. This way, it can let those who realize it exists think it's _their _idea to protect and hide it, and their idea, as well, to persecute Death Eaters and Dark wizards. If your Ministry friends had to deal with the fact that it was sentient, they might have been more worried."

Harry worried his lip and tried to remember for a moment if Malfoy had said that the defense he'd seen in the Pensieve memories was of wizarding creation or not. He couldn't remember, however, so he tried another question. "And so you realized you could break the ward when you came closer to it?"

"Yes," said Malfoy, drawing the word out into a hiss and looking up at him. His eyes held that poisonous, faraway light that he'd showed whilst they were giving each other handjobs yesterday. Harry stirred, reluctant to think of that memory. From the sharp smile Malfoy gave him, he might have sensed Harry's discomfort. "It's a variation of a Dark ward, Potter, if you'll believe that. One common to my family, and to my family's books." His hands clenched, and he laughed, and Harry realized suddenly that he was seeing the methods Malfoy used to control immense anger. "The bastards raided the books they claimed they'd destroyed for ideas, and then added just enough 'defensive' magic to the ward that they could pretend it wasn't Dark. I'll need your help to get through those extra defenses, since you've spent time in the Ministry in the last few months and probably know more about them than I do. I can undo the Dark magic."

Abruptly he locked his fingers together behind his head and hissed again. "I have it," he said.

"What?" Harry was thinking of the Ministry's hypocrisy again, and marveling that he hadn't noticed before the strange lack of problems that Hermione, in particular, had with using the books they'd confiscated. He looked up.

"How to explain the price you'll have to pay to break the Troublestone." Malfoy leaned forwards. "What you're giving up is your life."

Harry felt a strange beat of expectancy travel through him like the blood pounding behind his temples. Maybe he had always known that his life, twice claimed back when he should have died, would be demanded as a price someday.

"You're not _listening_ to me," Malfoy snapped. "I know that look in your eyes, Potter. You think you'll be required to die physically, when you're only dying in the memory of everyone who knows you."

Harry, with the bloodbeat still in his head, looked at him and raised an eyebrow. "Perhaps you could better the explanation that you spent so much time dreaming up so I can actually _understand _you, Malfoy."

Malfoy drew a shaky breath, though Harry wasn't sure why. Maybe he had sounded like one of the captors who must have hissed his last name as a curse into his ears. Harry bit his lip firmly against the temptation to apologize, and waited.

"The charisma focus that the Troublestone chooses is intimately bound to it," Malfoy said. "It spreads—at least in twisted form—the ideals that he or she stands for, and makes other people think their actions are right because they're doing what that beloved leader would want them to do. If the charisma focus dies, the Troublestone loses its power." He looked up, eyes stark. "I once considered killing you, so that the Troublestone would teleport away and bother someone else."

Harry nodded. The suggestion didn't even shock him. He was still in that place beyond and between shock and expectancy where Malfoy's first words about death had moved him.

"And then I realized that that wasn't enough." Malfoy leaned forwards, staring at him until Harry thought there wasn't a bit of his soul that remained unexamined. That was only an illusion, he told himself. Malfoy was seeing Harry as he had imagined him to keep himself sane through torture and darkness. That was all. "I didn't want the Troublestone merely to teleport itself somewhere else. I wanted it _broken._ The suicide of the charisma focus wouldn't do it. That's happened before, and the Troublestone still survives. And killing you wouldn't do it. But if you die in people's _minds_…if they forget you entirely…then the Troublestone loses, all at once, the ideals that it's spreading, which were your own, and the person it used to reassure its victims that those ideals were still pure, because you were the living exponent of them. It destroys both sources of its power, your life and the emotions that it feeds on."

Harry swallowed dryly. That was—a rather different proposition. "So they would forget that I'd ever existed?"

"They would forget your _existence_, I should have said." Malfoy curled his lips back and gave a rasping bark of laughter, though Harry didn't see what about the situation was funny. "Your continued existence. They would think you had died, in a battle or at your own hand, depending on what kind of ritual situation we constructed. They would be unable to remember the fact of your life."

Harry bowed his head and placed his hands carefully across his face. For long moments he concentrated on nothing but the coolness of his fingers against his brow, how they brushed against the rougher and number skin of his scar. The lightning bolt that had sealed so much of his life, made him special to Voldemort when he was a teenager and to wizards and witches all over Britain before he was out of babyhood, and had made him so instantly recognizable to anyone who read the _Daily Prophet_.

_There had to be a price. I have too much already, don't I? No one survives the Killing Curse once, let alone twice. I thought I gave my life up when I used it to protect the people at Hogwarts. Third time's the charm. This time, I really am giving it up to protect them—to protect everyone, even the people on the opposite side of the war—and even if I keep that life for myself, the rest of them will never know._

"Does that apply to everyone who lives?" he asked, looking up. "Would I be able to go into the Muggle world and make a new life for myself?" He concentrated on shaping the words carefully with his lips and making them as clear as possible. He wanted to speak without breaking, and he would if he allowed himself to really think about what he was saying.

"You could, I suppose," Malfoy said, staring at him with angry wonder. "But why would you _want _to?"

"I'd have to have other people to get hold of food and clothing and other necessities of survival," said Harry, idly amused that Malfoy wouldn't think of that when he'd lacked those necessities himself for so long. "If no one in the wizarding world can see or remember me, then—"

"That forgetting doesn't apply to everyone in the wizarding world," said Malfoy, almost savagely, as if he thought Harry had ignored an important aspect of the situation on purpose. "Only to those who are victims of the Troublestone and need your sacrifice to free them. Those who aren't can still remember you."

"Wonderful," Harry said. "Then I'll probably have to flee into the Muggle world anyway, to avoid the vengeance of those who had terrible things done to them in my name." His breathing was slowing, though, and he was beginning to accept the idea. At least it was an _action_, a kind of atonement for what he'd done or hadn't done in the past year. When it was given, then perhaps he could escape the worst of his guilt.

"You idiot," said Malfoy, and his voice roughened until it sounded as if he were forcing the words through shards of broken glass. "Haven't you thought of someone else who suffered but wasn't corrupted by the Troublestone?" He reached out and clasped Harry's hand. Harry started. He hadn't even been aware that he'd moved away from the fireplace and close enough to Malfoy's chair for the other man to do that. "_I'll _be here, Harry."

Harry licked his lips. The situation he had thought of as temporary that morning, his association with Malfoy, looked as if it were on a fair way to becoming permanent.

"Why do you think I dreamed so much about you, for so long?" Malfoy's voice was almost lulling, or would have been if Harry was in any normal mood. His fingers unwound from Harry's hand, but traveled up his arm and latched onto his shoulder, tugging on the collar of his robes. His smile was deep and solemn and poisonous. "I was realizing what price destroying the Troublestone would exact, even then. I tried to imagine what you would say when I told you, and that led to imagining you as you were, as I might have you. I knew that I was one of the Troublestone's victims and would be able to remember you after you had destroyed your memory in your friends' heads. And I became convinced that I had to have you."

Harry shuddered, but his emotions were buried once again, controlled by the pressure of Malfoy's hand on him and the clinging embrace of his eyes. "You—you came up with this method to destroy the Troublestone only because you wanted to have me?" he whispered.

"No." Malfoy's smile was slow, and slithered up his face. "No. It is the only way to make it happen, and if the Troublestone had had a different charisma focus, I would have sought out that person and proposed the same idea. Presuming they weren't disgusted by me. Presuming they didn't simply turn me over to the authorities the moment I appealed to them. But you. But you." His breathing was fast and shallow. His hand slid up to the back of Harry's neck and his fingers fastened there like lobster's pincers. "I knew you would never succumb to the pressure of the people around you, not in the same way. I knew that you would listen to me and that you would be someone I could have." He searched Harry's eyes for a long moment, then tried to pull him down into a kiss.

Harry resisted. He didn't know exactly what he felt or what he wanted right now, but he knew what he didn't want. It was enough to get used to the fact that he would have to give up his friends and all the people he knew, except maybe Dennis Creevey, and go into exile. He didn't need Malfoy trying to drag him into another burst of passion that would only add to his confusion.

"You don't care that my friends will forget me," he said, stepping away from Malfoy, "compared to the fact that you can have me."

"I don't mourn the necessity," Malfoy said, his smile and eyes still too bright.

Harry turned away from them, uneasy. The proprietary way Malfoy had looked at him on the day Harry first learned the truth about the Troublestone made sense now. Even then, he'd been planning on binding Harry to himself.

_Even though it would probably be better for him, as well as for me, if he tried to go back to a normal life when this is done._ Harry's life had to alter irrevocably, but why should Malfoy want to change more than his wounds had already changed him?

Harry could feel Malfoy's eyes on his back as he left the room. They were as flat and warm and claiming as the touch of his hand.


	7. Determination

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Seven—Determination_

Harry lay on his bed and looked up at the ceiling, trying to ignore the feeling of wrongness about it. This wasn't his own bedroom at his flat; this was a room he had spent perhaps two months of his life in. It wasn't the sort of place where he wanted to make a decision as life-changing as the one that awaited him.

But it was the place he had.

That was the thought that drowned his self-pity and kept his mind fastened to the path it needed to take. This was the place he had. This was the choice he had: to give up his friends and the people who had surrounded him and loved him for the last eight years, or to watch the world sink further into darkness.

He'd felt this way once before, Harry told himself. He had looked into Snape's Pensieve memories, seen that he'd have to die, and begun to tremble and shake. He'd screamed in his head that there must be a different way, that he couldn't be asked to sacrifice _this _much, and that surely someone else could take up the burden.

But no one else had been there. No one else would be there now.

And at least he could go on living, which wasn't an assurance he'd had when he walked into the Forbidden Forest to confront Voldemort. He could carry his own memories into the future, and hope to live within them. People in the magical world abroad should still be able to remember him, because only Britain was under the influence of the Troublestone. He ought to make a life for himself in France, or Germany, or Italy, or—where was a place that actually spoke English? Canada, maybe, or Australia.

_This isn't the end of the world, and I ought not to mourn like it is._ Harry braced his hands on the bed and pushed himself upright against his pillows. _I do still have choices, and options. Think of the dead, like Narcissa Malfoy. They'll never have what I do. And I owe them, and all the others who have died and been tortured—like Malfoy himself—a debt I can't repay unless I get rid of the Troublestone forever._

Harry's shoulders relaxed as he remembered what Malfoy had promised him. The sacrifice of his own memory in the minds of the Troublestone's victims would shatter the damn sapphire forever, and not allow it to teleport anywhere else. That would lift his guilt. No one could ask any more of him than that, since even killing himself would only cause the Troublestone to teleport.

_I'm going to do this._

Harry closed his eyes and spent a moment thinking about Hermione, Ron, Kingsley—whom he hoped he hadn't killed—Neville, Ginny, Mrs. Weasley, Bill, all the other people he knew who had laughed and mourned with him in the past eight years. Tears threatened his eyes for a moment, but he shook his head and they subsided. They would remain alive, and that _had _to be worth it.

"Made your decision, Harry?"

Even Malfoy's voice was clinging, Harry thought as he opened his eyes, draping itself along his throat and shoulders like a cobweb. Malfoy stood in the door of the bedroom, his arms folded and his eyebrow lifted. He might have managed to carry off the cool impression of someone who didn't care very much, except Harry could see the trembling in his hand before he managed to close it around his elbow.

"I have," he said, deciding to ignore Malfoy's use of his first name for now. "I have to do this, or I'll suffer and they'll suffer."

Malfoy closed his eyes and hummed. "I'm glad to see that you're reasonable about that part," he said. He went on before Harry could ask what other part existed to be reasonable about. "How did you want to die?"

"I _beg_ your pardon."

"They'll think you died no matter what," Malfoy said patiently. "But you can choose the manner of your false death. Do you want to go in a heroic sacrifice? Do you want to pretend a Death Eater killed you?" His voice hardened minutely. "I would ask that you not choose that one, since it might lead to increased persecution in the wake of the Troublestone's disappearance. Not even shame over their former behavior could keep them from getting angry at us if they thought we killed the Savior."

Harry nodded. "I want it to be a heroic sacrifice," he said. "Let them think I destroyed myself destroying the Troublestone."

"Which is only true, of course." Malfoy nodded. "You will wake a different person. Ever the honest Gryffindor." He stepped towards Harry, moving briskly, but that clinging warm gaze was back, and Harry shifted uneasily under it. "I'll gather the materials that we need for the ritual, then. Most of them should be here, since this is a pure-blood house once home to people who practiced Dark magic." He sat down on the end of the bed, which made Harry pull his legs closer to his chest. Malfoy didn't seem to notice. "And are you reasonable about the other part? About our fates being intertwined?"

"No," Harry said irritably. He had mentally surrendered his hold on his friendships and the people he loved, everything that made his life worthwhile. He didn't see why he should have to surrender his freedom. "I don't care how much you dreamed about me. That doesn't mean we'll still be living together twenty years from now. Our—connection—is temporary. You might need me, but I won't necessarily need you after I've had some time to get emotional distance from this."

"This will affect for the rest of your life," Malfoy said, barely breathing the words. "You'll never get pure emotional distance."

Harry nodded quickly. "I know. But that doesn't mean I need to be your friend or your l-lover."

"So nervous," said Malfoy, his voice a croon. He cocked his head. "Have you not slept with another man before?"

"No," said Harry, and told himself that he wouldn't seem impressed or nervous, no matter what Malfoy wanted to think. "I slept with Ginny, and that was enough for me." He eyed Malfoy for a moment. "Excuse me for not seeking you out earlier and indulging in all the delights of the flesh you think you have planned for me."

"I do wish you'd sought me out earlier," Malfoy said, and bowed his head for a moment. "If only so I needn't have spent as long as I did in the dungeons."

Harry winced and pulled his legs up to his chest again, resting his forehead on his knee. No matter what he said, it was the wrong thing.

"But even when I recover from the delusions that admittedly crept up on me when I was in pain and starving," Malfoy said, his voice as brisk as his movements of a moment ago, "I'll want you. And I can provide you with a safer place than most of the other people who might remember you."

Harry lifted his head and blinked at him. "Why? Malfoy Manor was seized, too, and I'm sure the Ministry has found any family properties that you tried to keep secret."

"Hmmm." Malfoy sighed and rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. "Well, I still know more about the underground of the wizarding world than you've learned in the last year, I think you'll agree. If nothing else, I had more opportunity." He dropped the hand with a shocking suddenness and leaned forwards, bringing his face within an inch of Harry's before he could back away. Malfoy's voice was low and intense. "What's been forged between us won't end when the Troublestone is shattered. I need you. You need me. It's _necessary._"

Harry took a deep breath and tried to think, to find the words that would pierce through the walls of what Malfoy had admitted was a delusion. "It would be convenient to accompany you for a time," he began. "But that doesn't mean we need to stay with each other permanently, or—or have sex again."

"Really?" Malfoy's face had an obscene look of tender understanding on it, obscene because Harry couldn't think of an emotion that belonged there less. He slung one leg onto the bed and crawled forwards until Harry was shrinking and flinching to avoid him. "You couldn't use the comfort? You aren't dying to feel something beyond heroic determination and hopeless despair? You don't want me to make you feel pleasure in more than a single desperate moment after the battle?" He tilted his head to the side, and there was a whimsical smile on his mouth. "You don't want to know what my hands can do to your naked skin? It was through cloth last time, after all."

Harry hated how weak he was, that the words Malfoy was speaking sounded good to him.

"You don't want—" Malfoy began, and reached out to stroke the top of Harry's knee.

"You know what the fuck I want?" Harry spat, yanking his leg away. "I want some bloody sympathy for giving up my life yet again! I want a break from being the sacrifice for once! I want the universe to choose someone else to right all the wrongs of the world and spare the evil and the good and the horrible and the righteous! I want to live out the rest of my days in comfort with Ron and Hermione and the Weasleys, and forget this awful year ever happened." To his shame, his voice cracked, and he pushed his face into his hands, breathing deeply and evenly to rid himself of the temptation to cry.

"You can't have most of those things," said Malfoy, his voice utterly reasonable. "But sympathy? Yes, I think I can do that."

His arms wrapped firmly around Harry's torso, and then he used his chin to nudge Harry's hands away from his face. Harry stared at him, certain his eyes were swollen and full of tears, certain Malfoy was about to mock him.

Instead, Malfoy kissed him, his lips firm and gentle, moving against Harry's not to urge them to open but because he wanted to sigh into Harry's mouth. Harry sat stiff, and Malfoy stroked one hand across the nape of his neck and leaned him back into the pillows. Then he crawled on top of Harry, and Harry was surrounded by a cocoon of warmth, just as he'd hoped a few moments ago that he might be. But that wish was even more impossible to voice than his wish that things could be different.

"Everyone needs comfort," Malfoy whispered into his ear. "I can do that, whether or not you let me make you feel good."

"This makes me feel better than sex," Harry said, his eyes shutting involuntarily.

A startled silence, and Harry tensed, fearing Malfoy would laugh. But Malfoy shook his head, his hair rasping across Harry's forehead and his scar, and said, "You're a strange one, Harry Potter." His arms tightened again. "I can't take this burden away from you, but I'll be at your side, helping you bear it."

Harry shivered. Such a strange ally, not the one he would have chosen. But then, had he been able to choose, nothing about this situation would have happened at all; his friends would have remained in possession of their own minds and Malfoy would have escaped being tortured.

The universe wouldn't listen to him, so he had to make the best of what remained.

"That's the real reason you shouldn't be so anxious to leave me," Malfoy breathed into his ear. "I want to help you, and God knows you could use the help." For just a moment, his lips touched Harry's forehead where his hair had rested.

Harry finally gave in and hugged Malfoy back, fiercely enough he thought the other man would wince. But Malfoy never spoke a word of complaint, and Harry fell asleep that way, pinned down by the person who, in the world at the moment, most understood him.

* * *

"A knife," said Malfoy, and picked up one that had lain in the corner of the attic for Merlin knew how long. He hefted it thoughtfully in his hand, and Harry edged nearer to look at it. It was made of dull steel which shone oddly at the edge, as though a strip of silver had been inlaid there, and the hilt was some slick dark stone, obsidian perhaps. Harry didn't have to concentrate to feel the aura of Dark magic wavering about it.

"Why a knife?" Harry shook his head. "Wouldn't it be just as likely that I'd kill myself by drowning or some painless poison?" He'd thought he remembered reading, sometime in the research they'd made him do instead of real Auror work for the past year, that those were the two most common methods of suicide.

Malfoy laughed quietly and spun on one heel to face Harry. Harry kept his expression carefully blank, but a little current of exasperation burned under that. He didn't understand the change that had come over Malfoy since their impromptu nap. Suddenly he seemed almost maniacally cheerful, and he traveled through the attics and abandoned rooms of Grimmauld Place as though he knew where every Dark artifact they'd need was. Harry had tried to suppress uneasy suspicions of betrayal, and really, he hadn't found it too difficult. Malfoy wanted revenge on the people who had imprisoned him and the people who were ultimately responsible for that imprisonment because they'd interdicted his wand and his blood. He wouldn't put the effort to break the Troublestone in jeopardy.

But neither did Harry know what decision he'd come to that had so changed his mood.

"A knife is more dramatic, Harry," Malfoy said, and took a dancing step closer to him. His eyes were so brilliant that it was like watching two windows alight in a burning building. "A knife makes it more likely that they'll believe the false scenario and ritual we construct. Of course you would slit your throat and spill your blood in order to awaken them from the Troublestone's grip, and of course you would do it with a knife like this." He brandished the blade with the obsidian handle again.

Harry nodded slowly. When he could step back enough to look at his suicide—or his pretended suicide—from an emotional distance, he could admit that sense of the fitness of things. "All right," he said. He glanced back at the basket of items Malfoy had collected on the table next to them. "The knife, a horn, a sapphire bracelet—"

"Which we only really need for the sapphires," Malfoy said, curling his lip as he tossed the knife into the basket. "Thank God. Bloody ugly thing."

Harry nodded politely, though he really didn't see why this was the moment to comment on the taste of the Black ancestors. "And oil," he said. "What else?"

"A potion, but it's dead easy to brew and I've already confirmed that I have the ingredients." Malfoy leaned against the wall for a moment, his hands clasped behind his back. His chest rose and fell with deep breaths. Harry eyed him, and then decided to just ask. In the strange mood Malfoy was in, he might get lucky and receive a straight answer.

"What's made you so cheerful?"

Malfoy's eyes flared open, and he bolted across the room towards Harry, stopping in front of him with a precision as unnerving as it was beautiful. He reached out and framed Harry's face with his hands, carefully stroking Harry's cheeks with the tips of his index fingers.

"You," he said.

Harry blinked at him and said nothing. He didn't want to interrupt Malfoy, but even without that, he doubted he could have said anything that would make _sense_ around the lump in his throat.

"You did it," Malfoy said. "You agreed, where so many other people would have bargained or sought some other solution. You know the meaning of duty, and you know the meaning of love."

Harry made a rough movement before he could stop himself, as if he would seize Malfoy's hands and take them away from his face. Malfoy removed them before he could touch them, and laughed.

"Love for your friends, and not for me," he said. "I'm not mad enough to think that you love me yet."

Carefully ignoring the _yet _for now, Harry stared him straight in the eyes. "And you're so thrilled just because you thought there was a chance I wouldn't sacrifice my friends' memories of me for the Troublestone? But what kind of person would I be if I didn't do that?"

"An ordinary one," said Malfoy. "And the world is full of them." He reached out and seized Harry's shoulders, guiding him close enough that he could kiss him passionately. Harry kept his mouth firmly closed, and after a moment Malfoy moved away from him again, grinning.

"You have to admit that was worth a try."

"Why?" Harry faced the basket of Dark magical items Malfoy had collected, and did his best to work on removing the blush from his face.

"Because it was _self-evidently_ worth a try, so you have to admit it." Malfoy sounded as exasperated as a cat who'd fallen into the bath.

"No." Harry looked back at Malfoy, though he had the feeling that he was tempting fate by doing so. "Why was it worth a try to you?"

Malfoy smiled. "You're the hero I hoped for," he said, "the hero the world needs right now. And I've always wanted to kiss a hero."

"You could put your lips to your mirror and get a more passionate response," Harry retorted.

Malfoy's face changed; the smile vanished so quickly that Harry fell back a pace in spite of himself and laid his hand on his wand. He told himself he was ridiculous even as he moved. If he didn't trust Malfoy by now, why in the world had he agreed to the git's insane plan?

"You think I'm a hero." Malfoy's voice trembled. One hand rose as if he would touch his own hair or reach out to Harry, and then dropped back to his side again.

"Of course." Harry rolled his eyes when Malfoy just went on staring at him. "What else can I do to prove it?"

"That's enough," said Malfoy. "I simply had no idea that you thought it, that's all." He moved forwards again, his hand rising so slowly that Harry didn't take alarm until he found it resting against his cheek. And then it would have seemed stupid to jerk away from so mild a touch, so he settled for glaring instead.

"Your pleasure and your comfort matter to me," Malfoy said, his eyes searching Harry's expression. "I know you don't believe me right now, but they do. And after you save the world, those things will still matter to me." He took Harry's hand and kissed the back of it this time, then moved over, picked up the basket, and raced towards the stairs down from the attic. Harry blinked after him until he called impatiently, "Really, Harry, the ritual won't complete itself, you know."

Harry followed him, mind patterned with confusion.

* * *

And once again they stood outside the Ministry with Malfoy tucked under the Invisibility Cloak, mostly to hide his hair, and Harry with his own ordinary cloak pulled over his head. He watched the wards flicker and dance over the phonebox that would let them into the Ministry, and wondered what anti-Potter ones they had added in the past few days. Would they use wards that detected his blood? Surely they had a sample of it somewhere they could work off of. Or would they simply try and trap him, desperate as they must be to rescue him from the clutches of a man they probably thought had used Imperius on him?

Malfoy touched his elbow, and Harry started, but he understood the silent message and acknowledged it with a nod. They had to act. Simply standing here would do no good. He moved forwards, and Malfoy moved after him, softer than the shadow he resembled.

The wards on the phonebox refused to spit when they encountered him, and Harry raised his eyebrows. _Well. They must have decided to take the chance of my showing up and causing havoc again. Or maybe the Troublestone has persuaded them that I'm not to be interfered with no matter what happens._

_Or else there are wards further into the Ministry that are meant to trap me. _Harry grinned, and knew it was a savage grin that would have frightened him if he could have seen it reflected. _Maybe they just don't think I'm bold enough to come in by the front door._

No wards spat at them as they entered the phonebox, either, and jolted down, whilst Malfoy stood close to Harry just because he could. Harry shut his eyes and composed himself. No wards, but they must have surveillance spells. He and Malfoy would step out into a greeting force of Aurors in the Atrium.

And then they stepped into the Atrium, and met no one. Harry froze, staring around. There was a large hole in the floor where the Fountain of Magical Brethren had been, now covered with the blue dome of a magical barrier. The snow-thick wards Harry had become used to seeing still draped and decorated the walls and doors and fireplaces. But no one was there to stop them, and the wards ignored Malfoy as if he didn't exist, though he had said they couldn't use the blood spell to protect him this time and make the magic think he was Harry.

"What is going on?" Harry whispered, mostly to himself.

Malfoy answered him from the side, making Harry start and turn. "Once there was a phoenix," he said, as he pulled the Invisibility Cloak from his shoulders and head. His hair wasn't ruffled, and it seemed to shine with a light of its own; the dim lamps above the fireplaces weren't strong enough to reach that far. "And a group of people who served the phoenix, and called themselves after it, because they fought the Dark Lord. And why not? The phoenix is a powerful symbol of the light devouring the darkness."

He shook his head and lifted a hand. Shadows moved about them. Harry stared around and saw wizards and witches stepping from the corners. Most of them had deeply scarred faces and limps, or missing limbs, or the general world-weary look Harry had got used to seeing in the mirror. More than one had a bared left forearm, and there he could make out the Dark Mark. They moved in the same absolute silence Malfoy had displayed, and from their uplifted wands trailed blue and silver sparks, which formed a dampening curtain over the wards.

"But when darkness fights darkness," Malfoy continued, his voice high-pitched and eerie and exalted, "you need a different symbol than a phoenix." Harry heard a swishing noise that might have been Malfoy sweeping a hand through the air, but he was enthralled by the people in front of him and couldn't look away.

The wizards and witches turned back their sleeves, or lifted their robe collars, or pulled at chains around their necks until the medallions on them hung openly on their chests. Each symbol thus revealed was the same: a stylized, rearing serpent with wide-spread wings and a curl trailing out of its mouth that might be meant to represent a stream of flame.

Malfoy's boot scraped on the floor. Harry turned to face him and saw his eyes shining the same way they had in the attic earlier, with mad flame.

"I couldn't reveal them to you until I knew I could absolutely trust you," Malfoy said softly, "until you had made a commitment equal to ours and said that you would sacrifice your life to break the Troublestone." He bowed, but kept his eyes fastened on Harry all the time, so there was nothing of subjection in the gesture. "The Order of the Dragon, and its leader, at your service."


	8. Courage

Thank you for all the reviews!

This is the last chapter of _Secondhand Heroes_. Thank you for reading along!

_Chapter Eight—Courage_

Harry was sure he looked like an idiot, gaping at Malfoy, but he needed a moment to take this in. He put his hands to his head, gripping his temples hard between his fingertips, and whispered, "You had help all along?"

"_Some _help," said Malfoy, and his voice held a sediment of bitterness and wry humor that Harry would not have expected to hear from him. "My people could only do so much without revealing themselves, and I had commanded them to stay hidden until we had a sure chance of destroying the Troublestone. They were too valuable to risk in any lesser endeavor."

"Including rescuing you from torture," said Harry, opening his eyes and staring straight at Malfoy.

"Yes." Malfoy sighed and ran a hand up his face. "Not one of my most brilliant plans, I admit. I only wanted to learn about those Death Eaters who _hadn't _agreed to join the Order of the Dragon, and find out what they intended to do about the Ministry's increasing paranoia. They captured me instead and inflicted the scars on me that you saw. They thought me a traitor for not joining one of _their _groups that was trying to fight the Ministry." He sniffed. "Idiots. Those groups will amount to nothing, because they have no coherent plan and they think too much of taking revenge." He fixed his eyes on Harry. "I was almost glad, later, that I had those scars and those nightmares. They made you think of me as a hero, and I absolutely had to capture your sympathy before I could entrust you with the secret of the Order." He made another sweeping gesture at the mass of silent, watching wizards and witches, all of whom now shone with a silver-blue light. Harry thought they must be blocking the Ministry's wards.

"So you lied to me, then," Harry whispered.

"About how I knew about the Troublestone? Yes. I had done the research and recognized its influence before I became a prisoner of those Death Eaters." Malfoy was absolutely calm, his eyes glittering with the blue-silver light in a way that made Harry wonder if he had chosen it for his group's signature color on purpose. "About how I felt about you, about how you became a beacon in those dungeons for me? No."

"But you said—"

"Capturing your sympathy was an essential thing," Malfoy said, his voice growing sharper. "We had to know that you were committed to this sacrifice. Tell me the truth, Harry. If I had suddenly appeared out of the darkness and told you about the Troublestone and that I had a plan to destroy it, but one which required your cooperation, would you have believed me?"

Harry swallowed slowly. Then he shook his head. He felt so _strange. _Not even his acceptance of what would have to happen to him in his friends' memories had made him feel heavy and light at the same time, as if he were swimming underwater.

"Good." Malfoy firmly took his arm. "My people will guard us and watch for any intruders whilst we perform the ritual to mimic your suicide and destroy the Troublestone."

Harry went with him. The Order of the Dragon closed in behind them, still supernaturally silent, shining with shadow. They walked as in a dream before death down to the room where the sapphire awaited them.

* * *

The moment they stepped through the door into the Wizengamot's courtroom, the Troublestone began to shift, the facets glittering with wild light. Harry could feel it reaching out to him again, a cold blade aimed at the center of his resistance, designed to destroy his loathing of it.

Malfoy laughed, a high, breathless sound that made Harry flinch; it reminded Harry far too much of the way Voldemort had sounded when he was happy. He set the basket of Dark artifacts down near his feet and raised his wand—and when had he acquired that? Harry supposed one of Malfoy's followers must have given it to him when Harry wasn't looking—to incant a spell that sounded like the slithering of wet fish against one another. A thin mist formed between them and the Troublestone, dimming its glitter.

"That won't last for long," Malfoy murmured as he lowered his wand, "although it's one of the most powerful protective spells I know, a variant of what's keeping the wards quiet." He turned and grabbed both Harry's wrists, drawing him down into a kneeling position. Suddenly they were close, and Harry could smell Malfoy's sweetly sour breath and see the way his eyes contained and birthed fanaticism.

The sight made Harry ache with empathy. Malfoy had given himself to the destruction of the Troublestone in the way that Harry had given himself to the destruction of the Horcruxes, and in many ways the end result was the same: it had burned up some of the gentler parts of who they were. Harry freed one of his hands from Malfoy's grasp and reached out to cradle his chin. Malfoy blinked at him.

"You didn't need the scars and the nightmares to make me think you were a hero, Draco," Harry whispered. "I would have called you one for freeing me from my apathy and making me think about someone besides myself for a change."

"Really." Draco's voice was emotionless, but Harry understood why. Harry had offered him something he wanted deeply without showing clearly why he'd changed his mind. Harry smiled, and he didn't care if the smile was desperately sad. He gently stroked Draco's cheek.

"Yes. You _are _a hero, and you've helped me remember what it's like to be one. And you—" Harry shot a swift glance around the Wizengamot's courtroom, determined no members of the Order of the Dragon had followed them in, and looked back at Draco. "You gave me the first taste of pleasure I can remember in what seems like a thousand dark and formless months. Thank you."

His face was burning by the time he finished, but he still said the words. Draco stared at him with wide, greedy eyes, as if wanting to remember the way Harry's face had looked as he made the declaration for the rest of his life.

"Will you come with me, when this is done?" he whispered. "Will you stay with me?"

"I'm thinking about it," Harry said steadily, whilst the memories of what Draco had acted like in the past few days played through his head. How much of that had been a necessary art, as he thought, in order to try and bind Harry to the cause of destroying the Troublestone, if only because he pitied someone who had suffered as Draco had? How much had he concealed beneath the surface, during times when he'd probably been in communication with the Order of the Dragon? "If you think you need me, if you don't mind that I want you in _different _ways—"

"Yes, and no." Draco licked his lips, eyes feral for a moment, and then glanced sideways. Harry followed his gaze and realized the mist that protected them from the influence of the Troublestone was fading.

"Let us do this," said Draco, seizing both of Harry's hands again in a crushing grip. "We will have time to talk of the details and the consequences later."

Harry gave him a small smile, and nodded. Draco leaned forwards, bit Harry's lip until he drew blood, and then pulled back, licking carefully at it. Harry held still; Draco had told him to expect pain in the first parts of the ritual.

Draco recited several Latin words of which Harry could only make out one he thought meant "blood." The Troublestone flared at them. Draco ignored it serenely and brought his hands around Harry's throat.

Harry felt his heartbeat speed up, but he held still again, his hands hanging defenselessly at his sides. Draco had told him that the initial stages of the ritual mimicked several postures of death, such as being choked, leading up to the final moment of "suicide" with the blade.

Draco purred another string of Latin words into his ear, and Harry had the odd feeling that he was being seduced in the middle of a powerful Dark magical ritual. He would have laughed if the moment didn't feel so tightly-strung already.

Then Draco had him lie back on the floor whilst he plucked the horn from the basket of Dark magical artifacts and sounded it. Harry shivered at the noise. It roused echoes from the corners of the room and then multiplied them, so that they gained strength instead of losing it. He arched his neck and found himself exposing his throat to Draco out of instinct. For a moment, one of Draco's hands descended to caress it.

When the time came for Harry to stand again, he thought he would rise himself, but instead Draco grabbed his wrists and dragged him upright. Harry found himself standing with his back to Draco's chest, surrounded and clasped firmly by the other man. Harry could feel a hard pressure against his arse, and he shivered, though whether it was with fear or desire he didn't know. He tilted his head back so it rested on Draco's shoulder and felt nothing disgusting, this time, about the stirring in his own groin.

Draco whispered the next phrase into his ear again, and then smeared a handful of the oil he'd found in Grimmauld Place along Harry's cheeks and forehead. Harry shuddered. It felt heavy and sticky in a thoroughly unpleasant way, and it was as warm as blood. Draco's fingers spread it in swarming puddles, and as if he knew what Harry was feeling, he ground into Harry's backside again.

For just one moment, twelve words in English slipped in among the Latin. Harry would have worried that Draco was disrupting the ritual for the sake of reassuring him, except that he knew Draco's dedication to destroying the Troublestone was absolute and so such a thing would never happen.

"_I promise you more pleasure, and I expect more pleasure from you._"

And then Draco was turning him around as if they danced so that Harry faced him, and he handed him the knife.

Harry took a deep breath. The ritual wasn't complete without blood shed from him, and from one of the major veins. He cut his wrist carefully, so that the blood began to pour, and barely heard the spell Draco cast to close the wound immediately.

The blood fell on the floor of the courtroom, and a single puff of red smoke rose from it. The echoes of the horn returned, once again growing stronger, and Harry felt the oil on his face dry and pull into a stiff mask.

The Troublestone went mad.

Suddenly lights and noises were going off in Harry's head, and from the way Draco looked, the stone had done the same thing to him. Draco started to bend at the waist. Harry knew the ritual would be disrupted, or probably disrupted, if Draco dropped his wand or fell unconscious.

He stepped forwards and embraced Draco, drawing him up to rest against his shoulder as he'd done before when he thought he simply nodded comfort, and wrapped his hand around Draco's on the wand. Draco had told him that Harry could perform no magic with his own wand in this ritual, or his friends stood a chance of recovering his magical signature and not forgetting him. But the hawthorn wand was an old friend, and in some ways seemed to fit his palm and his magic better than his own.

Harry murmured the words of his _own_ most powerful protection spell, learned in the last year when he'd had the crazy idea that he could somehow protect and free prisoners, and a ball of golden light flew out of the wand and hovered between them and the Troublestone. A flat golden spiderweb spread across the air between them, the strands growing thicker. Harry lowered the wand with a sigh.

"There," said Harry, and stepped back from the Troublestone, looking at the basket. The sapphire bracelet lay inside, but Draco would have to be the one to actually use it, along with the potion. He had described the ritual to Harry only in outline, not in detail. "What do we need to do next?"

Draco stretched like a leopard in his grasp and turned back to him, eyes shining. He traced one patch of oil on Harry's face for a moment, but said nothing as he snatched up the sapphire bracelet. The Troublestone pulsed again, and one line of the golden web cracked. But it wasn't through yet, Harry judged with a quick glance, and it would be some moments yet before it was.

"As the small is destroyed, so shall the large be," Draco whispered. He pried one of the sapphires from the bracelet, dropped it on the floor, and then took out the vial of potion from his robe pocket. It had a glimmering, shifting light inside it, more like fire than any liquid Harry had ever seen. Draco uncorked the vial and tipped the potion onto the sapphire.

The sapphire dissolved, becoming small blue bits floating in a waste of orange and gold. The Troublestone flashed with a dazzle that made Harry blind for a moment and broke several more threads of the golden web. Then they were staring at a puddle of blackened, scorched floor with no trace of the sapphire left, and Draco was chuckling.

"It doesn't like that," he said. "It sees its own fate in the fate of its smaller cousins. As the small is destroyed, so shall the large be," he repeated, and took out another sapphire, placed it on the floor, and poured the potion over it. "You need to take up the knife," he added.

Harry picked up the blade and then nearly dropped it in surprise. It was hot, and the silver inlaid along the edge of the blade shone with a glinting light that was not a reflection of the potion. "What does this mean?" he muttered.

"The knife is the chosen instrument of your faked death," Draco said, never taking his gaze off the second dissolving sapphire. The Troublestone shone brightly enough now that Harry had to keep his eyes averted from that part of the room. "It's tasted your blood, and it's getting ready to taste more than that. Your friends' memories, your life in their imagination. As the small is destroyed, so shall the large be." The potion consumed a third sapphire. The echoes of the horn sharpened and came back again, making Harry worry for a moment whether the Order of the Dragon could really keep the Ministry from noticing what was happening here.

The knife vibrated in Harry's hand, growing hotter and making his arms twitch with the magic. He coughed as smoke poured into his lungs and backed away from Draco. But the knife came with him, and it seemed to absorb the fire and bathe him in it. The warmth grew to a sensation just short of pain.

Draco destroyed a fourth sapphire, and a fifth. Harry looked up, eyes watering, and wondered if that was the end of them, but no, Draco was clutching a sixth gem and stepping towards him. The Troublestone was pressing through the last of the golden web now, a brilliant presence that made Harry flinch.

"We need to do the last step," whispered Draco, and placed his free hand in the middle of Harry's chest. Following his push, Harry lay down. Stone beneath his back, he thought hazily, and stone above him, as Draco brought the sapphire close to his face. And fire, fire everywhere, in the smoke and the Troublestone and the knife in his hands and the shine in Draco's eyes.

"You need to cut your own throat with the knife."

Harry felt a moment of terrified rejection flood through him. How could Draco expect him to do that? He had agreed to sacrifice his friends' memories of him, but not his life. And even when he had walked into the Forbidden Forest to die at Voldemort's hands, as he thought, it had not required him to face such pain. He had known that Voldemort would use the Killing Curse.

Draco's free hand rested on his shoulder now. "Trust me," he said, his voice thick and hot, like smoke, like stone. "You will live. The knife will be bathed with your blood and create the false impression of a suicide, but then it will heal you again with the magic that I'll release when I destroy the last sapphire at the same time. The fear you feel now is the Troublestone interfering, trying to make you panic, as it fights for its existence." He smiled into Harry's eyes. "Trust me."

Harry raised the knife, staring into Draco's eyes, and fell through a single spiraling moment when he thought about Ron and Hermione and Kingsley and all the people who wouldn't see him again, even if he saw them.

And Draco.

It always came back to Draco, first wizard of his own age he'd met and the last one he was seeing now.

Harry pulled the knife across his throat. He caught a blurred glimpse of Draco pouring the potion over both his fist and the sapphire, and he heard a roaring scream like the earth grinding apart. He thought he caught a glimpse, though how he could have with the angle of his head he didn't know, of the Troublestone fracturing and flying apart, an enormous smoking hole blasted in its side, through which something transparent and sooty and evil fled.

And then it was over.

* * *

Harry opened his eyes slowly. His throat hurt. He lay in a bright place that dazzled him without his glasses. Or did his eyes have smoke damage, perhaps? he thought, as the last memories before his dying returned.

_My not-dying. Draco was right about my survival._

Harry started to turn over, and then a hand was on his shoulder and Draco's voice was murmuring, "Shh. The wound was symbolic and didn't kill you, but it still went deep. You'll have to be careful whilst you heal from it. Since it was created by Dark magic, blood magic, it'll have to heal in the normal way."

Harry nodded and lay back on the thing that cradled him—couch? Bed? "Can I have my glasses?" he whispered, careful to keep his voice low and non-threatening.

"Of course." Draco held out the glasses to him, or a twist of blur and silver wire that might have been his glasses, and Harry accepted and fumbled for them, slowly slipping them over his face. At once he could see again, and he could see the expression on Draco's face as he leaned above the silver-blue bed that cradled Harry, reflective and proprietary.

"Did it work?" Harry whispered.

Draco smiled and reached to the side, to a table that Harry didn't feel like turning his head to see, coming back with a triangular shard of dark blue stone. Harry touched a finger to it, and shivered. He didn't need to be particularly sensitive to feel the Dark magic beating from it, and it was still hot. A light caught and glinted on one edge for a moment, like the light that the Troublestone had flashed to try and capture him, but that went away the moment it reached the break.

"The Troublestone is gone." Harry had no words for the depth of the peace and the exultation in Draco's voice. "The thing I worked for the last year to accomplish is done." He sighed, his face soft as he gazed at the shard of sapphire.

"I thought I saw something flee from it—"

"The Dark intelligence, yes, trying to find another home." Draco smirked. "You don't need to worry that will cause any trouble. That was one reason my people remained behind. They were watching for it, and they caught it in a crossfire of very effective curses. It's gone."

"Oh." Harry swallowed, and winced. He supposed he had a thick, ugly scar across his throat at the moment. He wondered idly if it would remain. "And—where are we? How long has it been?"

"Two days," said Draco quietly, his face assuming a more serious expression as he laid the bit of Troublestone on the table again. "We're in one of the Order's safehouses."

"The place you said you could bring me," said Harry, closing his eyes. "And I wondered where that could be, since I _knew _the Ministry confiscated all your family properties."

"Yes." Draco's hand wandered into his hair, playing with it. Harry could feel tension behind those fingers, but he didn't know why. As Draco said, he had done what he most wanted to do.

At least, he didn't know why until Draco said, "Do you forgive me for lying? I'm sorry, but I _had _to know I could trust you before I told you about the Order, and I wanted you to myself for as long as I could have you, knowing that I might not be able to have you at all when you learned what my plan was—"

Harry felt a great burst of compassion move through him, not unlike the one he'd felt when he'd seen Draco's scars for the first time. He reached up and wrapped his arms around Draco's shoulders, bringing him down until his chest touched Harry's. Draco opened his mouth in a hot gasp of surprise against the side of Harry's neck.

"I forgive you," Harry whispered to him, rocking him back and forth—or maybe just shifting him. There was only so much rocking one could do whilst lying in a bed beneath someone else, after all. "What you did was forgivable in the name of saving the world—"

"I don't want it to be only that to you—"

"I know." Harry forced his eyes open and found himself staring into Draco's. Harry took a long, shivery, nervous breath, for so _many _reasons, and ran his fingers down the side of Draco's face. "I still don't really understand the process by which I became essential to you. Was any of that a lie?" he added belatedly.

Draco ducked his head. "Some of it," he muttered. "Some of it was exaggeration so that you would feel sorry for me. But not what I did to you after the battle—"

"What _we_ did." Harry tugged a lock of his hair. "Speaking otherwise makes it sound like you raped me."

"What _we_ did," Draco said, and seemed utterly unable to keep a slow, delighted smile from stretching across his mouth. "Yes, that was true. And I do need you. I do want you. I did dream about you in the dungeons, though by then it was partially because I understood how necessary you would be to destroying the Troublestone."

Harry nodded. And Draco hadn't felt he could trust him with this—well, in his place, Harry wouldn't have trusted Draco, either.

"I can accept that," he said. "I can accept—everything." A strange, light, falling sensation invaded his body. He was gone from the minds of everyone who knew him, dead and to be mourned, but he was also free of the expectations and the burdens the wizarding world had wound about their hero, and the embarrassing worship that would have continued in some form or another, if not as intense. "I want to stay with you. I don't know if I'll ever be exactly what you need me to be, but—"

His voice was cut off as Draco kissed him, thrusting his tongue savagely into Harry's mouth. Harry lifted his head and gasped, reveling in the intensity of it, and did his best to kiss back, though the angle of their heads made it difficult.

"You already have been," Draco said when he pulled away, his voice thick with satisfaction.

"And you've been—what I needed," Harry said, thinking of the way Draco had brought him back to life, made him feel sudden and strange pleasure, brushed him with fire from a distant world he hadn't realized existed. "Yes, I'd like to keep on trying."

Draco shut his eyes. He seemed to be falling asleep, as though Harry's declaration had relieved him from an enormous weight of tension. "Stay with me," he murmured. "Stay with the Order. We still have problems that we need to solve in the wizarding world, Harry, things that need to be healed and put right. The Troublestone is gone, but not the shame and horror that people are going to feel now they've woken up. The wounds between Muggleborns and half-bloods and pure-bloods need to be healed."

Harry felt a cold trickle of fear move through him for a moment. To stay in Britain where his friends might still meet him—

But Draco had explained that they simply would not be able to see him, their minds unable to form new memories of him past his "suicide." And Harry could put up with an occasional meeting to have the chance to do good, useful work, and maybe continue being a hero, since the world didn't stop needing one just because the great evil was defeated.

And to be with Draco.

Draco was asleep, breathing and drooling, though surely he would deny that, into the corner of Harry's neck. Harry kissed his cheek and closed his eyes.

_I don't have guaranteed happiness, but I have a chance at it, no matter how difficult. And I'm free. And I'm with him._

_How many people could say the same?_

**End.**


End file.
